THE 


OURSE 


OF 

EMPIRE 


ONTGOMERY  SCHUYLER 


THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 
OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


Westward  the  Course 
of  Empire 

"  Out  West  "  and  "  Back  East " 

on    the   First  Trip   of  the 

"Los  Angeles  Limited" 


Reprinted,  with  Additions,  from  the 
New  York  Times 


By 

Montgomery  Schuyler 


G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons 

New  York   and    London 

TEbe  IRnicfccrbocfcer  press 

1906 


COPYRIGHT,  1906 

BY 

G.  P.  PUTNAM'S  SONS 


lEbe  ftnfdfcerbocfeer  press,  "Hew  ISJotft 


To 

THEODORE   ROOSEVELT 

The  Typical  American  of  our  Time 

Who  is  equally  at  home  in  all  parts  of 

Our  Country 


500662 

LIBRARY 


PREFATORY   NOTE 

MY  DEAR  PUTNAM: 

I  am  really  very  much  obliged  to  you 
for  calling  my  attention  to  Bayard  Tay- 
lor's "El  Dorado."  It  is  distinctly  my 
loss,  and  perhaps  a  little  my  shame,  that  I 
was  not  before,  in  any  detail,  aware  of  its 
existence.  If  I  had  had  specific  knowl- 
edge of  the  book,  I  should  surely  have 
availed  myself  of  that  knowledge  when  I 
arrived  upon  that  lovely  California  coast 
which  Taylor  visited  fifty -six  years  before 
me,  after  a  voyage  from  New  York  that 
took  him  four  months  and  a  half,  and  me 
four  days!  His  studies  were  correspond- 
ingly leisurely,  —  whereas  this  booklet 
which  you  are  so  gracious  as  to  publish  is 
clearly  the  rapid  record  of  a  "rush." 

You  and  I  both  know  our  "Sparrow- 
grass"  and  may  bear  in  mind  his  literary 


pretators  IRote 


reference  to  California  (I  quote  from  a 
"distant  memory,"  as  Mr.  Evarts  said 
about  St.  Paul) : 

Know  ye  the  land  that  looks  on  Ind  ? 

There  only  you'll  find  a  Pacific  sailor  — 
Its  song  has  been  sung  by  Jenny  Lind, 

And  the  words  were  furnished  by  Bayard  Taylor 

It  were  absurd  to  compare  this  hasty 
report  with  the  narrative  of  Taylor's 
painstaking  investigations.  But  it  is  a  true 
satisfaction  to  the  later  and  more  cursory 
traveler  that  his  report  is,  as  was  the 
case  with  Taylor's  volume,  to  be  associ- 
ated with  the  honored  imprint  of  your 

house. 

Yours  faithfully, 

M.  S. 
To  GEORGE  HAVEN  PUTNAM. 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Out  West     -* 

Day  First.     The  Prairies    ...  16 

Day  Second.     The  Plains    ...  28 

Day  Third.     The  Desert  ....  42 

Day  Fourth.     In  the  Garden  .    .  52 

Day  Fifth.     Up  the  Coast  ...  73 

Day  Sixth.     The  Golden  Gate     .  93 

Day  Seventh.     Over  the  Range    .  101 
Day   Eighth.     The   City   of   the 

Saints 108 

Back  East 121 

Considerations  by  the  Way 127 

Liberty    .    .    .    .   ' 129 

Equality 13$ 

Fraternity I&3 

Triumphant  Democracy   ....  IQ5 


vii 


LIST    OF    ILLUSTRATIONS 


The  Los  Angeles  Limited  .  .  Frontispiece 
Our  Guides,  Philosophers,  and 

Friends face  page  2 

The  Santa  Ana  Viaduct ...  "  "  IO 

The  Platte  in  Flood  ....  "  "  18 
"  To  the  low  last  edge  of  the 

long  lone  land"  ....  "  "JO 

The  DeviFs  Slide "  "  Jc? 

Pulpit  Rock "  "  40 

Ranching  in  Utah "  "  42 

The  Devil's  Bridge,  Utah  .  .  "  "44 

Hotel  at  Riverside "  "  S° 

Above  the  Clouds  on  Mottnt  Lowe  "  "  54 

"  The  House  of  Roses"  .  .  .  56 

The  Bells  of  San  Gabriel  .  .  «  «  58 

A  Calif ornian  Tally- Ho  ...  "  "62 

"  Extra  — Just  Out !  "  .  .  .  "  "  J2 

Our  Christmas  Dinner  .  "  "  126 


vii 


"OUT  WEST" 


Westward  the  Course  of 
Empire 


The  pleasure  of  your  company 
for  the  initial  trip  of 

The  Los  Angeles  Limited 

is  respectfully  requested  by  the 

Chicago  and  Northwestern  Ry., 

Union  Pacific  R.  R. 

and 
Salt  Lake  Route. 

Present  this  card  at  the  train  leaving  Wells  Street  Station, 
C.  &•  N.  W.  Ry.t  Chicago,  10.05  P.  M.,  Dec,  17,  zgoj. 


IN    obedience     to    this     summons, 
neatly  engraved  on  steel,  your  cor- 
respondent, together  with  some  thirty 
other  newspaper  men,  presented  him- 
self at  the  appointed  place  and  time, 


Tldest 


all  of  them  but  the  Chicagoans  already 
more  or  less  wayworn  with  journeys 
from  their  homes.  They  were  hospi- 
tably  received  by  Messrs.  Lomax  and 
Darlow  of  the  Union  Pacific,  by  whom 
the  whole  trip  was  personally  con- 
ducted with  a  kindness  and  courtesy 
which  were  often  to  be  taxed  and 
never  for  a  moment  to  fail  for  the 
ensuing  ten  days. 

Doubtless  every  reader  of  news- 
papers by  now  knows  that  the  occa- 
sion was  the  celebration  of  the  direct 
outlet  of  the  Union  Pacific  over  its 
own  road  to  Southern  California. 
Rather  over  "Senator  Clark's  road." 
Already  the  Union  Pacific  had  a  prong 
northwestward  to  Portland,  in  addi- 
tion to  its  virtually  straight  westward 
course  to  San  Francisco.  The  im- 


OUR  GUIDES,   PHILOSOPHERS  AND  FRIENDS 


Westward  tbe  Course  of  Empire     3 

mense  "boom"  of  Southern  California 
made  it  increasingly  desirable,  and 
even  urgent,  that  it  should  have  a 
southwestward  prong  to  that  rich  and 
traffic-bearing  region.  This  it  has  now 
obtained,  as  thus: 


Diverging,  as  you  see,  at  Ogden,  the 
new  prong  stretches  out  to  Los  Ange- 
les and  San  Pedro,  the  port  thereof, 
almost  in  an  air  line,  not  quite  so  aerial 
in  fact,  of  course,  as  in  the  sketch  map, 
and  there  completes  the  system,  by 
the  northward  connections  of  the  Val- 
ley line  and  the  Coast  line,  with  the 
terminal  of  the  main  line  at  San  Fran- 


©ut  West 


cisco.  A  plain  and  facile  proposition 
on  paper.  But  in  fact  it  has  been  a 
work  of  secular  accomplishment,  in 
which  the  struggle  was  not  only  of 
man  with  nature,  but  also,  and  per- 
haps chiefly,  of  man  with  man,  of 
"magnate"  with  magnate.  It  was 
the  Mormons  who  made  the  first  es- 
says, the  Mormons  who  had  their 
little  link  from  Ogden  to  Salt  Lake 
virtually  ready  when  the  famous  "last 
spike"  was  driven  on  the  roadway  of 
the  Union  Pacific,  the  Mormons  who 
even  then  cherished  the  hope  that  they 
would  be  able  to  protrude  southwest- 
ward  a  line  of  railway  along  "the  Old 
Mormon  Trail."  This  was  the  trail 
that  the  prudent  Brigham  Young  had 
caused  to  be  broken  to  the  Southwest, 
immediately  as  an  outlet  to  and  an 
inlet  from  the  Pacific,  but  also  ulti- 


TKHestwarfc  tbe  Course  ot  Empire     s 

mately,  no  doubt,  in  prevision  of  the 
time  when  the  Latter  Day  Saints 
might  be  dislodged  from  the  oasis  of 
Utah  as  they  had  already  been  dis- 
lodged from  the  banks  of  the  Missis- 
sippi, where  these  eyes  have  seen  from 
the  steamboat,  now  many  years  ago, 
the  melancholy  dilapidating  relics  of 
the  temple  of  Nauvoo.  The  "  pre- 
liminary surveys"  for  the  Clark  road 
were  made  by  the  Mormon  pioneers 
just  as  truly  as  the  preliminary  sur- 
veys for  the  Union  Pacific  across  the 
plains  and  through  the  passes  of  the 
Rockies  were  made  by  those  same  pio- 
neers. And  it  is  equally  strange  and 
striking  in  each  case  how  closely  the 
trail  of  the  pioneers  has  been  followed. 
It  was  in  1847  that  the  Mormon  pio- 
neers made  their  way  westward  across 
the  plains  to  the  oasis  of  Utah.  It 


©ut  West 


was  in  1851  that  the  Mormon  "ex- 
ploring expedition"  to  the  southwest 
of  Utah  was  dispatched.  It  is  a  little 
more  than  half  a  century  later  that 
the  railroad,  of  which  our  train  is  the 
first  signal  for  the  opening  to  trans- 
continental travel,  follows  in  their 
wake.  There  is  no  more  wonderful 
chapter  even  in  the  wonderful  story 
of  "The  Winning  of  the  West." 

Manifest  Destiny  has  long  pointed 
out  this  route  to  the  garden  of  Cali- 
fornia and  the  trade  of  the  Pacific. 
"It  can  safely  be  stated,"  says  the 
author  of  the  official  "Story  of  a 
Trail,"  "that  not  a  mile  of  railway  has 
been  constructed  in  Utah  south  of 
Salt  Lake  City  which  has  not  carried 
the  hopes  of  its  builders  that  sooner 
or  later  it  would  become  part  of  a 


tbe  Course  ot  Empire     7 


line  extending  from  Salt  Lake  to 
Southern  California."  The  Mormons 
built  gradually  southward  until  in  1880 
their  road  had  reached  'Frisco  in 
Southern  Utah.  And  it  was  precisely 
in  1880  that  this  outlet  to  the  Pacific 
engaged  the  attention  of  the  powers 
that  were  of  the  Union  Pacific  and 
that  a  scheme  for  the  "Salt  Lake  and 
Western"  took  shape.  But  the  time 
was  not  ripe.  Eight  years  later,  un- 
der the  presidency  of  Charles  Francis 
Adams,  the  Union  Pacific  not  only  had 
accurate  surveys  made  of  the  Mor- 
mon trail,  but  graded  a  roadbed  as 
far  south  as  Caliente.  But  the  time 
was  not  yet  propitious.  The  crash  of 
Baring  Brothers  preluded  a  tightening 
of  the  purse  strings  of  the  world.  Just 
afterward,  Jay  Gould  became  the  pre- 
siding genius  of  the  Union  Pacific, 


8  ©ut 


He,  too,  had  velleities  in  the  direction 
of  executing  the  decrees  of  manifest 
destiny.  But  again  the  time  was  not 
ripe.  He  was  confronted  with  the 
terrible  Huntington.  That  mild-man- 
nered old  gentleman  in  his  black  skull- 
cap by  no  means  made  the  personal 
impression  of  a  Terror.  But,  all  the 
same,  he  was  a  strong  man  armed, 
keeping  his  "territory"  until  a  stronger 
than  he  should  come.  Jay  Gould  was 
not  that  stronger  man,  and  the  pro- 
ject languished  and  lapsed.  Truly,  it 
seems  that  it  could  not  have  been  ac- 
complished before  the  merger  of  the 
Union  and  the  Southern  Pacific.  Then 
again  Mormon  capital  and  enterprise 
took  up  the  wondrous  tale,  and  other 
tentatives  there  were,  tentatives 
stretching  from  San  Pedro  northeast- 
ward as  well  as  from  Salt  Lake  south- 


Westwart)  tbe  Course  ot  Bmpire     9 

westward.  But  the  terrible  Huntington 
was  always  there  to  repel  invasion, 
with  his  private  port  of  Santa 
Monica,  so  to  speak,  to  oppose  to  San 
Pedro  as  a  terminus.  Collis  P.  Hunt- 
ington died  during  the  summer  of 
1900,  and  for  the  hour  of  his  funeral 
no  wheel  turned  on  the  Southern 
Pacific  system.  Senator  Clark  of  Mon- 
tana, with  his  brother  as  his  local 
vicegerent,  again  projected  the  com- 
munication between  Salt  Lake  and 
San  Pedro,  and  found  himself  con- 
fronted with  a  merger  of  the  Union 
and  the  Southern  and  the  Oregon 
Short  Line,  which  supplies  the  link 
between  Ogden  and  Salt  Lake  City, 
and  which  had  its  own  connections 
with  the  failures  and  its  own  claims 
upon  their  assets.  Then  ensued  an- 
other battle  of  the  giants,  the  issue 


©ut  TKIlest 


being  narrowed  to  the  control  of  the 
pass  in  Nevada  known  as  the  ' '  Meadow 
Valley  Wash,"  a  pass  quite  indispens- 
able to  through  operation.  This  issue 
was  brought  into  the  courts  and  pub- 
licly debated.  But  the  battle  of  the 
giants  was  chiefly,  all  the  same,  a  con- 
fidential contest,  a  duel  in  the  dark, 
in  which  the  threat  of  independent 
operation  on  the  one  side  is  supposed 
to  have  been  met  by  the  threat  of  the 
deadly  parallel  on  the  other.  It  lasted 
from  1900,  when  Senator  Clark  came 
forward  to  finance  the  Salt  Lake  route 
from  Salt  Lake  City  to  San  Pedro,  till 
it  was  ended  in  1902  by  a  treaty  of  peace 
and  amity  between  the  Senator  and  Mr. 
Harriman,  whereby  the  claims  of  the 
Oregon  Short  Line  south  of  Salt  Lake 
were  to  pass  to  the  Salt  Lake  route, 
and  the  two  "systems"  were  to  con- 


Westward  tbe  Course  of  Empire    n 

struct  on  joint  account  the  line  from 
Caliente  in  Nevada  to  Dagget  in  Cali- 
fornia, to  reconstruct  and  jointly  oper- 
ate the  Pacific  link  from  Riverside  to 
San  Bernardino  while  there  was  to  be 
a  joint  operation  with  the  Santa  Fe* 
over  the  ninety  miles  from  Dagget  to 
Colton,  where  a  so-called  paralleling 
would  really  have  involved  a  wide 
detour,  even  though  the  actual  arrange- 
ment threatened  chronic  friction.  Even 
so,  construction  was  confronted  with  en- 
gineering obstacles  sufficiently  serious, 
the  most  conspicuous  being  the  bridg- 
ing of  the  Santa  Ana,  a  watercourse 
which  is  now  a  rill  and  now  a  raging 
torrent,  and  which  is  spanned  by  the 
most  monumental  feature  of  the  line, 
the  viaduct  of  a  dozen  arches  in  con- 
crete, "reinforced  concrete,"  one  sup- 
poses, each  of  impressive  dimensions. 


©ut  Mest 


The  first  train,  an  official  train,  passed 
over  the  line  last  February.  The  first 
regular  interchange  of  trains  between 
the  termini  occurred  last  May,  while  the 
first  attempt  really  to  incorporate 
the  new  line  in  the  general  system  of 
transcontinental  passenger  traffic  is 
betokened  by  this  Los  Angeles  Lim- 
ited of  which  we  are  to  take  the  initial 
trip.  It  is  this  line,  twenty-four  hours 
in  time,  something  over  seven  hundred 
miles  as  the  crow  flies,  and  much 
nearer  eight  hundred  as  we  go,  that  we 
have  specifically  " come  out  for  to  see." 
The  layman  has  a  very  imperfect 
notion  of  what  the  establishment  of  a 
new  daily  transcontinental  service  in- 
volves or  what  faith  in  the  future  it 
implies.  On  his  limited  train  to  Bos- 
ton, to  Washington,  or  even  to  Chi- 
cago, he  meets  his  counterparting  train 


Westwaro  tbe  Course  of  Empire    13 

whizzing  past,  at  the  conjoint  rate  of 
a  hundred  miles  or  more,  and  may 
vaguely.conjecture  that  there  is  a  spare 
train  in  reserve  somewhere,  at  the  end 
or  in  the  middle.  But  the  three-day 
trip  across  the  continent  is  a  very  dif- 
ferent matter.  It  involves,  as  a  matter 
of  fact,  nine  trains  in  actual  operation 
across  the  continent,  going  or  return- 
ing, and  a  complete  emergency  train 
held  in  reserve  at  either  end,  or  eleven 
trains  in  all.  Each,  like  this  of  ours, 
composes  itself  of  two  or  three  Pull- 
man sleepers,  of  a  dining  car  on  occa- 
sions, and  of  the  combined  smoker  and 
buffet,  observation  car,  and  library 
which  is  the  novelty  of  the  equipment, 
the  buffet  smoker,  rather  more  than 
half  the  length  of  the  car  being  screened 
off  with  glass  from  the  passage  along- 
side, so  that  the  ladies  may  resort  to 


14  ©ut  West 


the  observatory  in  the  rear  with  their 
auditory  and  olfactory  nerves,  if  not 
their  optic  nerves,  protected  from  the 
unholy  rites  within.  For  the  purposes 
of  this  journey,  a  typewriter  was  in- 
stalled at  the  writing  desk  in  the  ob- 
servatory, though  nobody  used  it, 
everybody  betaking  himself,  for  his 
literary  occasions,  to  the  stenographer 
and  mimeographer  in  the  baggage  car 
away  forward. 

One  has  scarcely  time  for  these  ob- 
servations and  reflections  before  it  is 
time  to  turn  in,  with  benedictions,  not 
only  with  Sancho  Panza,  upon  the  in- 
ventor of  sleep,  but  upon  the  inventor 
of  nocturnal  darkness.  But  for  the 
nightly  dropping  of  the  curtain  upon 
the  scenery  one's  progress  westward 
would  be  but  a  bewildering  blur  of 
composite,  impression.  Whereas  one 


tKRestwaro  tbe  Course  of  Empire    15 

finds  in  the  outlook,  and  still  more  in 
the  retrospect,  that  the  nightly  curtain 
happily  divides  the  panorama  into  as 
many  tableaux  as  there  are  days'  jour- 
neys, of  each  of  which  he  retains  some 
coherent  recollection,  and  can  render 
at  least  to  himself  some  coherent 
account.  Shall  he  call  his  account, 
"Westward  the  Course  of  Empire:  In 
Eight  Tableaux ' '  ?  Meanwhile,  as  he 
wraps  the  drapery  of  his  Pullman  about 
him,  with  the  train  whizzing  westward 
into  the  dark  at  fifty  miles  an  liour, 
he  drowsily  recalls: 

The  Lord  knows  what  we  may  find,  dear  lass, 

And  the  Deuce  knows  what  we  may  do  — 

But  we're  out  once  more  on  the  Old  Trail, 

Our  Own  Trail,  the  Out  Trail, 
We're  down,  hull  down,  on  the  Long  Trail, 

The  Trail  that  is  always  new. 


Day   First 
THE   PRAIRIES 

When  we  turn  out,  we  have  already 
left  the  Mississippi  far  behind,  and 
are  traversing  the  flat,  fertile  prairies 
of  Iowa.  Three  hours  of  this  rich 
alluvium  by  daylight.  Interminable 
wastes  of  stubble,  scattered  farmsteads, 
unpretentious  abodes  of  rude  plenty, 
of  comfort  and  independence,  monoto- 
nous to  the  eye  though  so  deeply  im- 
pressive to  the  mind,  before  we  come 
to  the  Missouri,  to  which  we  confi- 
dently look  for  a  feature  in  the  feature- 
less landscape.  It  is  hardly  so.  The 
expanse  of  yellow  ooze  is  as  monoto- 
nous as  the  expanse  of  yellowish 
stubble  which  it  divides.  One  cannot 

16 


prairies 


conceive    a    painter    whom    it    would 
attract  to  reproduce  it. 

Truly,  the  huge,  gaunt  railroad 
bridge  which  spans  it,  and  gives  ac- 
cess to  bustling  Omaha,  is  more  im- 
pressive than  itself.  And  this  we  find 
to  be  the  keynote  of  the  day.  Man 
has  molded  and  ennobled  nature. 
Lewis  and  Clark,  Bonneville,  Catlin, 
any  of  the  pioneers  who  passed  this 
way,  would  find  nothing  to  regret  in 
the  aspect  of  things  if  he  should  pass 
this  way  again,  but  quite  the  contrary. 
One  scarcely  loses  the  Missouri  be- 
fore he  comes  upon  the  Platte,  that 
stream  of  which  one  scorner  has  said 
that  it  would  make  a  negotiable  river 
if  it  were  set  on  edge,  and  another  that 
it  could  be  sucked  up  at  low  water 
with  a  sheet  of  blotting  paper.  The 
Platte  "Valley"  is  a  flat  expanse, 


is  ©ut  "Mest 


bounded  by  hills  faint  and  blue  and 
low  and  distant,  seemingly  some  ten 
miles  on  each  side.  They  gradually 
decline  as  we  go  westward,  and  the 
river,  with  its  vast  and  lazy  and  un- 
explained meanderings,  though  we  en- 
counter it  now  and  again,  only  pres- 
ently to  lose  it,  and  to  mark  its  course 
by  low  growths  of  osier,  is  not  a  fea- 
ture. The  landscape  would  be  quite 
featureless  if  man  did  not  come  to  the 
rescue  of  nature.  But  these  treeless 
prairies  are  no  longer  treeless.  Fringes 
of  trees  take  the  place  of  the  clumps 
by  the  river  we  have  for  the  moment 
mislaid.  About  every  homestead  there 
are  groves,  groves  to  delight  the  heart 
of  the  Beaux  Artist,  for  they  are  as 
evidently  plantations,  as  plainly  the 
result  of  art  and  man's  device,  and, 
moreover,  as  "regularly  laid  out"  as 


prairies  19 


the  avenues  of  Le  Notre  at  Versailles, 
and  doubtless,  to  the  expert,  dating 
themselves  within  a  year,  according  to 
their  growth,  taller,  apparently,  and 
more  abounding,  certainly,  the  further 
west  we  go.  And  the  crops!  The 
mile-square  cornfields,  the  house-big 
haystacks  for  which  there  is  no  room 
in  the  barns.  ''Scots  wha  ha'e!"  as 
poor  Jim  Davis  used  indignantly  to 
exclaim.  "Why,  there  is  more  hay 
weighed  in  one  county  in  Illinois  than 
in  all  Scotland."  And,  a  fortiori,  in 
one  county  in  Nebraska,  one  would  say, 
judging  by  what  he  sees.  House-big 
heaps,  also,  of  corn,  sometimes  shelled, 
sometimes  in  the  ear.  Great  herds  of 
cattle,  great  "bunches"  of  horses,  great 
droves  of  swine.  But  one  flock  of 
sheep  so  far,  but  what  a  flock!  What 
myriads  of  dingy  fleeces  and  silly  faces! 


©ut 


Statistics  have  their  uses,  and  there 
are  inflammable  imaginations  they 
really  kindle.  It  is  very  well  to  read 
that  Nebraska  yields  a  million  tons  of 
hay  and  360,000,000  bushels  of  grain, 
260  of  these  millions  being  of  corn;  very 
well,  too,  to  read  that  the  States  served 
by  the  Union  Pacific  produce  51  per 
cent  of  the  farm  animals  raised  in  the 
United  States.  But  to  vitalize  these 
figures  and  make  their  dry  bones  live 
you  must  come  out  here  and  traverse 
the  State  as  we  are  doing,  and  let  the 
consciousness  of  what  it  all  means 
sink  into  you  mile  after  mile,  until, 
as  Charles  Reade  has  it,  "you  com- 
prehend the  meaning  of  the  word  ac- 
cumulation," the  meaning  not  only 
nor  mainly  as  to  vegetable  products, 
or  animal  products,  but  also  as  to 
citizenship.  The  prairie  farmer  is  com- 


\ 

Dairies  21 


monly  held  to  lead  but  a  dismal  ex- 
istence. His  historiographer,  Mr. 
Hamlin  Garland,  takes  that  view  of 
his  lot.  But  at  least  he  has  his  inter- 
ests, and  even  that  secure  source  of 
joy  which  is  involved  in  having  his 
hobbies.  Every  farmer  whose  farm 
we  pass  seems  to  have  his  specialty, 
whether  it  be  Herefords,  draught 
horses,  highly  specialized  sheep,  or 
swine,  white  or  black.  He  is  a  "col- 
lector" and  a  competitor,  and  every 
farmstead  has  the  look  of  a  section  of 
a  county  fair.  Surely  this  is  some- 
thing for  that  interest  in  life  inexpres- 
sible by  statistics,  as  well  as  for  that 
material  comfort  of  which  the  statis- 
tics tell  the  tale.  "High-Class  Bel- 
gians and  Percherons"  is  one  of  the 
advertisements  we  pass  in  a  country 
in  which  everything  seems  to  be  ad- 


©ut  West 


vertised  for  sale,  excepting  only  fer- 
tilizers. Their  day  is  a  long  way  off, 
as  one  perceives  when  he  sees  along- 
side acres  of  grayish-yellow  stubble 
acres  of  fresh  furrow  cut  in  the  black 
loam.  Farm  land  here,  one  tells  me, 
is  $75  an  acre,  as  against  $50  in  that 
part  of  New  England  I  know  best. 
To  recur  to  the  animals,  the  cow  is 
regarded  in  these  parts  as  primarily  a 
beef  bearing  animal,  as  was  inevitable. 
"On  the  range"  she  is  exclusively  so. 
The  Hereford,  in  a  dehorned  state, 
seems  to  be  the  standard  beefifer  of 
these  plains,  Holsteins  and  Jerseys 
and  Alderneys  and  the  other  lactifers 
being  conspicuous  by  their  compara- 
tive absence.  It  is  true  that  of  late 
Nebraska  has  been  taking  an  advanced 
stand  in  dairy  products,  and  I  should 
like  to  quote  you  the  statistics  which 


prairies  23 


I  have  had  and  mislaid.  But  it  re- 
mains true  that  Bos  is  chiefly  Beefifer. 
'  '  These  farmers  are  mostly  '  feeders,  '  ' 
says  the  expert  near  me.  Which  is 
to  say  that  they  buy  cattle  on  the 
range  to  the  westward  and  southward 
and  fatten  them  on  the  farm,  thus 
marketing  their  own  corn  crops  "on 
the  hoof"  and  in  the  most  convenient 
and  economical  way.  This,  of  course, 
does  not  apply  to  the  Herefords  or 
other  fancy  cattle,  whether  their 
specialty  be  beef  or  milk  and  butter 
and  cheese.  Neither  do  I  know  what 
advantage  the  black  pig  may  be  sup- 
posed to  possess  over  the  white,  ex- 
cepting picturesqueness,  and  even  that 
is  disputable.  We  meet  carloads  of 
both  kinds  grunting  eastward  on  the 
way  to  dusty  death.  As  the  early 
cattle  of  the  plains  were  primarily 


24  <smt  west 


beefiferous,  so  the  early  sheep  were 
primarily  lanigerous.  An  agriculturist 
explains  to  me  that  they  have  now 
imported  or  developed  a  "combina- 
tion sheep,"  so  to  say,  which  is  entitled 
to  high  and  equal  respect  for  his  fleece 
and  for  his  mutton,  but  I  have  for- 
gotten his  name. 

At  any  rate,  I  reject  with  scorn  the 
suggestion  of  a  cynical  neighbor  and 
co-spectator  that  theNebraskan  farmer, 
paying  so  much  intelligent  attention 
to  the  breed  of  his  other  domestic 
animals,  should  devote  some  of  it  to 
his  own  breed.  He  has  a  slack  and 
lounging  look,  perhaps,  the  Nebraska 
farmer,  as  you  see  him  at  the  stations 
or  pass  him  on  the  fields.  But  he  is 
the  cunning  creature  whose  work  we 
have  been  admiring  all  day.  We  have 


Ube  prairies  25 

been  riding  through  400  miles  of  Tri- 
umphant democracy.  It  is  a  land  of 
social  as  well  as  of  topographical 
equality.  We  have  not  seen  one  house 
which  could  arouse  envy  or  enmity, 
except  in  a  very  mean  breast,  for  we 
have  not  seen  one  beyond  the  reach 
of  any  honest,  industrious,  frugal  citi- 
zen. The  land  is  flowing  with  milk 
and  honey,  but  individually  the  tillers 
of  it  seem  to  have  that  happy  lot  of 
neither  poverty  nor  riches.  Surely 
we  have  seen  no  evidence  of  luxury 
on  the  one  side  or  of  squalor  on  the 
other.  The  stateliest  buildings  of 
these  rural  parts  are  the  schoolhouses. 
Against  the  fence  of  one  of  them  we 
saw  two  buggies  hitched  and  standing 
to  take  the  children  home!  lo  Tri- 
umphe!  One  is  almost  inclined,  in 
the  increasing  patriotic  enthusiasm 


26 


with  which  this  cumulative  spectacle 
of  comfort  and  independence  inspires 
him,  to  believe  with  Walt  Whitman 
that  the  best  way  to  celebrate  "these 
States"  is  his  way  of  cataloguing  and 
ejaculation.  Certainly  it  is  the  easi- 
est. But  as  the  dark  draws  in  and 
shuts  out  a  continuance  of  the  monoto- 
nous scene  of  prosperity  one  recalls  a 
more  coherent  eulogy  in  the  lines  of 
George  Alfred  Townsend's  poem,  read 
before  the  Society  of  the  Army  of  the 
Potomac : 


Deep  the  wells  of  humble  childhood,  cool  the 
spring  beside  the  hut ; 

Millions  more  as  poor  as  Lincoln  see  the  door 
he  has  not  shut. 

Not  till  wealth  has  put  its  canker  every  poor 
white's  cabin  through 

Shall  the  Great  Republic  wither,  or  the  in- 
fidel subdue! 


Ube  prattles  27 

Stand   around   your    great    commander,    lay 

aside  your  little  fears! 
Every  Lincoln  carries  Freedom's  car  along  a 

hundred  years. 
And  when  next  the  call  for  soldiers  rolls  along 

the  golden  belt 
Look  to  see  a  mightier  army  rise  and  march, 

prevail,  and  melt. 

And  the  morning  and  the  evening 
were  the  first  day. 


Day    Second 
THE    PLAINS 

One  wakes  to  look  out  on  huge  rocks 
alongside  the  track,  with  the  sem- 
blance of  ruined  towers  and  fantastic 
features  of  castellated  architecture  on 
their  eroded  summits,  and  finds  him- 
self tempted  to  add  to  the  silly  nomen- 
clature whereby  nature  is  degraded 
by  the  tourist  in  these  parts,  the  Bridal 
Veils  and  Devil's  Teapots  and  what 
not.  The  semblance  is,  however,  in 
this  case,  as  in  so  few  others,  so  strik- 
ing as  to  occur  without  being  sought, 
and  the  fallen  towers  and  crumbling 
battlements  do  really  suggest  the 
handiwork  of  moldering  and  forgotten 
men.  But  this  is  very  transient. 


ZEbe  plains  29 


Presently  form  and  comeliness  vanish, 
and  color  also.  Amorphous  lumps  of 
rock  of  a  lava  gray.  Fancy  the  cara- 
pace of  a  rhinoceros  in  the  thickness 
of  its  lumpy  folds,  but  in  its  hue  the 
hide  of  a  dirty  elephant,  stretched  by 
the  mile  along  the  roadway.  The 
vegetation  bears  about  the  same  pro- 
portion to  the  rocky  epidermis  that 
the  sparse  tufts  of  hair  on  an  unkempt 
elephant  would  bear  to  his  hide.  It 
is  of  the  dingy  sage  brush,  with  occa- 
sional speckles  of  white  sage,  and 
bunch  grass  of  an  unwholesome  sallow. 
From  morning  to  almost  noon  the 
gray  wastes  spread,  with  no  relief  but 
what  is  furnished  by  these  tufts,  and 
by  the  streaks  of  snow  that  nowhere 
form  a  carpet,  or  even  a  rug,  but 
simply  lie  in  the  wrinkles  of  the  pachy- 
derm. And  distance  lends  no  en- 


30  ©ut  TKIlest 


chantment.  There  is  no  grace  of  form 
or  charm  of  color  on  the  summits  of 
the  horizon,  nay,  no  summits,  for  the 
skyline  is  a  level  ridge,  "to  the  low 
last  edge  of  the  long,  lone  land."  In 
a  hundred  miles  only  one  conical  hill- 
top in  sight.  This  is  the  abomination 
of  desolation  spoken  of  by  Daniel  the 
Prophet.  Nothing  but  some  antedi- 
luvian and  arctic  saurian,  you  would 
say,  could  live  here.  And  yet,  along 
the  folds  of  the  monster's  hide  you  see 
cattle  and  sheep  grazing  and  grub- 
bing for  a  living,  cropping  the  white 
sage  and  bunch  grass  for  meat,  licking 
up  the  streaks  of  snow  for  drink. 
They  tell  you  that  these  are  not  in 
fact  the  Bad  Lands  of  Wyoming,  and 
you  wonder  what  the  lands  can  be 
that  are  worse.  The  features  of  the 
landscape,  even,  such  as  they  are,  are 


plains 


not  the  works  of  nature,  but  of  man, 
the  queer  contorted  sections,  segments, 
parallels,  echelons,  salients,  and  re- 
entrants of  close  rail  fence  which  serve 
as  snowbreaks  instead  of  the  former 
discarded  sheds.  From  the  car  win- 
dow their  disposition  looks  perfectly 
random.  But  they  are  in  fact  placed 
precisely  where  costly  experience  of 
many  snowstorms  dictates,  though 
where  no  anemologist,  if  there  be  such 
a  word  or  thing,  could  have  dreamed 
of  placing  them  on  theory. 

"God  has  forgotten  it,"  is  what  the 
neighbors  of  this  uninhabitable  land 
are  in  the  habit  of  saying  about  it. 
Certainly  man  has  shunned  it.  We 
see  no  signs  of  human  habitation  ex- 
cept the  huts  that  shelter  the  section 
hands  of  our  railroad,  though  we  may 


32  ©ut 


infer  human  proximity  from  trie  cattle 
and  the  sheep.  "On  God's  frontiers 
we  seem  to  be."  And  it  seems  as  it 
were  blasphemous  and  heaven-defying 
that  we  should  be  traversing  a  for- 
bidden country  with  every  circum- 
stance of  the  luxury  of  travel  which 
can  be  had  anywhere.  The  Easterner 
naturally  expects  to  find  in  the  wilder- 
ness some  traces  of  the  rawness  and 
roughness  of  pioneering  in  his  rail- 
roading, compared  with  longer  and 
more  thickly  settled  regions.  There 
are  absolutely  none.  The  train,  of 
course,  is  perfectly  up  to  date  in  its 
appointments,  indeed,  in  some  respects 
in  advance  of  date.  For  one  thing,  it 
is  the  most  brilliantly  lighted  train, 
notably  in  the  dining  car  and  the  com- 
posite car,  but  in  the  sleepers  also,  on 
which  I  have  ever  ridden.  With  the 


Ube  plains  33 


chandeliers  overhead  and  the  brackets 
alongside,  the  incandescent  bulbs  make 
our  nightly  dinner  a  really  dazzling 
scene.  And  you  can  read  or  write 
anywhere.  But  one  looks  for  a  rough 
roadbed,  for  example,  and  one  finds 
one  as  smooth  as  ever  cars  spun  over 
' '  down  the  ringing  grooves  of  change. ' ' 
You  can  shave,  for  example,  in  com- 
plete security  and  comfort  at  fifty 
miles  an  hour,  and  by  "  you"  I  do  not 
mean  the  user  of  a  safety  razor  —  that 
Man  with  a  Hoe  can  glean  his  stubble 
anywhere  —  but  the  user  of  a  real 
razor,  ' '  putting  his  sickle  to  the  perilous 
grain"  with  no  consciousness  of  peril. 
The  smoothness  is  such  that  the  differ- 
ence between  forty  miles  an  hour  and 
sixty  is  scarcely  perceptible  and  not  at 
all  noticeable  if  you  do  not  look  out  of 
the  window.  For  the  smoothness,  and 


34  ©ut  West 


for  the  dustlessness,  which  is  equally 
complete,  it  seems  that  the  Union  Pa- 
cific is  indebted  to  what  is  called  the 
"Sherman  gravel,"  but  what,  it  seems, 
is  not  a  gravel  at  all,  but  a  disintegrated, 
or  rather  an  inchoate  granite,  found  in 
inexhaustible  quantities  along  this 
desolate  tract  we  have  been  traversing. 
If  this  terrible  land  produces  nothing 
else,  it  produces  the  perfection  of 
"ballast."  And,  indeed,  there  are 
other  mineral  products  of  value.  As 
we  go  on,  heaps  of  black  sif tings  de- 
note coal,  the  reddening  rocks  may 
betoken  iron,  and,  on  the  horizon's 
rim  to  the  northwest,  skeleton  towers 
indicate  oil  wells. 

It  is  pleasant  to  know  that  the 
"conditores  imperii,"  for  such  surely 
were  the  builders  of  the  Union  Pacific, 


plains  35 


were  by  no  means  so  black  as  they 
have  been  painted.  Congressional  in- 
vestigation, instigated  by  a  press 
which  it  must  be  owned  has  not  in  all 
the  world  its  equal  in  a  scent  for 
scandal,  has  done  a  good  deal  of  black- 
ening. But  the  Oakes  Ames  monu- 
ment, which  it  seems  we  passed  in  the 
night,  well  deserves  salutation.  One 
ancient  scandal,  that  the  road  was  bent 
and  even  zigzagged,  to  draw  enlarged 
subsidies  per  mile  where  construction 
was  easy,  has  lately  been  effectually 
dispelled.  The  Union  Pacific  has 
undertaken,  with  its  modern  appli- 
ances and  its  modern  affluence  of 
means,  to  straighten  its  road  and  ease 
its  curves  and  its  grades  all  along  the 
line.  Such  things  are  necessary  and 
inevitable,  of  course,  in  a  country  in 
which  the  railroad  is  the  pioneer  road, 


36  ©ut 


and  betterments  are  left  to  be  paid  for 
out  of  earnings.  Well,  the  fact  is 
that  the  modern  engineers  with  their 
new  lights  and  their  new  means  have 
managed  in  this  country  here  to  save 
just  four  miles  in  four  hundred  over 
the  engineers  of  the  sixties,  a  fact 
which  ought  to  excite  much  blushing 
in  many  editorial  rooms.  There  are 
other  pioneers  to  whom  we  are  forced, 
however  unwillingly,  to  do  honor  here, 
the  Mormon  pioneers,  to  wit,  who 
traversed  this  desert  sixty  years  ago, 
and  whose  vestiges  we  are  following 
with  curious  exactness,  for  the  line 
which  modern  experience  can  do  so 
little  to  rectify  is  almost  precisely  the 
Mormon  trail  of  1847.  Senator  Smoot, 
a  man  of  dignified  and  attractive  pres- 
ence and  interesting  discourse,  is  one 
of  our  fellow-passengers,  and  he  tells 


Ube  plains  37 


us  that  his  father  and  mother,  in  1847, 
spent  eight  weary  and  perilous  weeks 
in  traversing  the  "Great  American 
Desert,"  between  the  Missouri  and  the 
basin  of  the  Great  Salt  Lake,  which 
we  are  accomplishing  in  twenty-nine 
hours,  comforting  themselves,  doubt- 
less, as  the  Plymouth  Pilgrims  on  the 
ocean  three  hundred  years  before,  and 
the  Israelite  pilgrims  in  the  wilderness 
uncounted  centuries  before  that,  with 
the  promise  "to  bring  them  up  out 
of  that  land  into  a  good  land  and  a 
large,  unto  a  land  flowing  with  milk 
and  honey."  Nay,  we  are  presently 
to  take  on  board  a  Mormon  patriarch, 
a  monogamous  patriarch,  I  hasten  to 
explain,  and  not  even  so  very  patri- 
archal, going  over  to  spend  his  Christ- 
mas with  his  family  in  San  Bernardino, 
who  has  himself  as  a  boy  crossed  the 


3s  ©ut  mest 


plains  three  times  with  an  ox  team. 
Oak  and  triple  brass  were  around  the 
hearts  of  these  later  pioneers  as  around 
those  of  the  earlier.  Nobody  can  pass 
over  their  track  without  admitting 
them  to  the  class  of  Columbus.  ' '  But 
that  is  another  story." 

One  takes  to  thinking  when  there 
is  nothing  to  look  at.  But  we  are 
coming  to  where  our  eyes  are  busy. 
Little  Evanston  is  a  great  relief  to  the 
eyes  and  mind,  a  true  oasis,  with  its 
winding  stream  bordered  with  pearl- 
gray  leafless  trunks  and  twigs  of  birches 
and  crimson  clumps  of  osier.  And  the 
mountains  begin  to  take  on  form  and 
comeliness  and  dignity  and  elevation. 
It  is  not  long  before  we  are  in  the  Echo 
Canon,  which  is  the  vestibule  of  Utah, 
surely  one  of  the  grandest  vestibules 


THE   DEVIL'S   SLIDE 


plains  39 


that  nature  ever  set  between  a  scene 
of  mere  ruin  and  desolation  and  a 
smiling  valley.  It  is  a  cleavage  in  the 
Wasatch  Range,  sentineled  on  one 
hand  by  that  Pulpit  Rock  from  which 
the  Mormon  Moses  is  said  to  have 
harangued  his  people  just  before  their 
entrance  to  the  promised  land,  and 
on  the  other,  not  far  away,  by  the 
gigantesque  and  grotesque  "Devil's 
Slide,"  a  sheer  rift  800  feet  high, 
flanked  by  huge  lips  of  naked  granite. 
Excessive  and  Gargantuan  freaks  of 
nature!  I  rather  sympathized  with 
that  member  of  our  party  who,  con- 
doled with  on  not  being  able  to  see  the 
Garden  of  the  Gods  and  the  Royal 
Gorge  and  the  other  scenic  wonders  of 
Colorado,  made  answer  that  he  had 
seen  Echo  Canon,  which  attained  the 
limits  of  the  scenically  permissible, 


40  ©ut  Mest 


and  that  anything  beyond  that  he  did 
not  wish  to  see,  being  certain  before- 
hand that  it  would  be  "in  bad  taste!" 

Some  miles  of  this  defile,  with 
momentary  shifts  of  scene,  according 
to  the  windings  of  the  road  and  the 
convolutions  of  the  mountains,  and 
we  come  upon  Ogden  and  civilization, 
typified  by  the  seemly  station  and  the 
thriving  town.  And  we  are  off  again 
for  Salt  Lake  City  and  the  beginning 
of  the  end  of  our  journey.  There  is 
light  enough  to  see  that  this  was  indeed 
the  Canaan  of  the  Mormon  pioneers,  a 
land  flowing  with  water,  which  in  these 
regions  means  milk  and  honey  and  all 
other  worldly  goods,  though  the  water 
again  is  brought  where  it  is  needed 
by  art  and  not  by  nature.  Endless 
avenues  of  the  Lombardy  poplar, 


PULPIT   ROCK 


plains  41 


which  looks  so  queerly  old-fashioned 
to  the  Easterner,  cottonwoods  thereto; 
huge  haystacks,  as  one  would  say,  but 
in  truth  of  the  alfalfa,  which  is  the  hay 
of  these  parts,  and  shows  green,  like 
ensilage,  in  the  heart  of  the  brown- 
skinned  stacks ;  rows  on  rows  of  leafless 
but  yet  hearty-looking  fruit  trees, 
though  no  sign  now  of  the  tomatoes 
the  canning  of  which  is  the  leading 
industry  of  the  valley.  And  so  for  the 
forty  miles  to  Salt  Lake  City,  where 
the  thickening  December  dusk  only 
allows  us  a  glimpse  of  the  six-horned, 
lofty,  gleaming  Temple  and  the  turtle- 
back  of  the  Tabernacle,  before  the 
brief  December  daylight  is  done,  and 
we  are  off  again  on  the  last  stretch  of 
our  journey. 

And  the  morning  and  the  evening 
were  the  second  day. 


Day  Third 
THE   DESERT 

That  twitch  of  the  window  shade 
which  marks  the  beginning  of  a  new 
day  on  a  Pullman  reveals  that  we  have 
been  reaching  during  the  night  a 
different  clime  from  that  in  which  we 
went  to  bed.  Plainly,  "we're  sagging 
south  on  the  Long  Trail."  The  first 
thing  one  clearly  makes  out  is  a  canvas 
camp,  apparently  of  a  construction 
gang,  three  or  four  big  wall-tents 
which  would  not  be  eligible  lodgings 
so  near  Christmas,  even  in  the  mild 
Salt  Lake  Valley,  and  near  by  a  mess 
tent,  this  time  of  wood,  with  the  pro- 
hibition chalked  on  the  door,  "No 

Meals  Sold  Here."     It  is  not  long  be- 
42 


Ube  Desert  43 


fore  the  spreading  roofs  and  overhang- 
ing eaves  of  Las  Vegas  remind  us  not 
less  than  its  tropical  name  that  we  are 
within  the  zone  of  Spanish  settlement. 
The  station  is  not  only  distinctly 
in  the  "Mission"  architecture,  but 
also,  like  all  the  buildings  of  the  San 
Pedro,  Los  Angeles  and  Salt  Lake 
Company,  even  to  the  great  viaduct 
of  the  Santa  Ana,  it  is  in  concrete. 
Why  not?  Concrete,  if  thick  enough, 
is  impervious  to  the  heat  from  which 
alone  man  requires  shelter  in  these 
parts.  The  sand  costs  nothing  but  a 
willing  mind  and  a  shovel,  and  the 
cement,  from  the  "coast,"  also  boasts 
itself  to  be  of  extreme  cheapness.  The 
station  buildings  are  in  fact  the  fea- 
tures of  the  line,  which  presently  has 
no  other.  For  presently  we  come  to 
"old  hushed  Egypt  and  its  sands," 


44  ©ut  West 


under  the  name  of  the  Mohave  Desert, 
as  featureless  as  the  sea,  and  ride 
through  it  for  what  seems  an  inter- 
minable time,  though  in  truth  our 
route  is  shortest  of  all  the  roads  which 
traverse  it.  Sage  brush  carpets  it 
save  where,  as  mostly,  the  floor  of 
sand  is  uncovered.  Huge  cacti  con- 
stitute its  other  vegetation.  The 
Uvada  Canon,  the  scenic  feature  of 
our  route,  we  passed  in  the  darkness, 
"Uvada,"  at  this  end  of  Nevada,  like 
"Calada"  at  the  other,  being  an  artful 
compound,  like  "Texarkana,"  to  de- 
note a  border  town.  Our  route  is 
almost  terra  incognita,  except  to  the 
prospector.  That  unhappy  man,  wan- 
dering these  waterless  wastes  and  ply- 
ing his  "dreadful  trade,"  may  count 
himself  lucky  if  he  returns  with  his 
life,  let  alone  with  promising  "speci- 


THE   DEVIL'S  BRIDGE,   UTAH 


Desert  45 


mens,"  from  this  dismal  scene,  where 
the  delusions  of  the  mirage  lure  him 
to  his  doom.  "Death  Valley,"  which 
we  presently  enter,  attests  the  dangers 
of  the  region.  Close  at  hand,  nothing 
but  the  cacti  and  the  sage  brush  and 
the  sand.  But  to  the  north  and 
marching  parallel  with  our  course  the 
bald,  gray,  treeless,  grassless  range  of 
the  gold-bearing  mountains,  serrated 
and  gnarled  and  wrinkled,  but  never 
scarped,  holds  out  the  promise  of  a 
richer  crop  than  the  most  fertile  valley 
grows,  and  men  point  out  along  its 
face  the  scenes  of  lucky  finds.  We 
pass  in  sight,  too,  of  another  deposit 
richer  than  the  richest  crop,  the  mine, 
quarry,  bed,  or  what  not  of  that  borax 
the  transportation  of  which  by  forty- 
mule  power  none  of  us  can  have  es- 
caped seeing  represented.  Ten  miles 


46  ©Ut 


at  most  away  one  would  say  the 
mountains  were,  but  in  this  desiccated 
air  it  seems  that  they  are  in  fact  thirty. 
Heaps  of  corded  tin  cans  and  bottles 
along  the  track,  neatly  piled,  doubt- 
less by  railway  gangs  under  orders, 
instead  of  being  flung  broadcast,  beer 
bottles,  one  naturally  suspects,  but 
quite  possibly  water  bottles,  since 
none  can  venture  on  this  desert  with- 
out bringing  his  own  supply,  and  the 
railroads  that  cross  it  have  a  "freight 
rate"  for  water  like  any  other  car- 
riageable commodity,  and  all  workmen 
are  on  an  allowance.  The  piles  are, 
at  any  rate,  the  only  visual  objects  in 
the  foreground  of  the  picture,  except 
the  cactus.  Strange  and  monstrous 
some  of  the  cacti  are.  What  do  you 
say,  for  instance,  to  a  prickly  red 
cucumber  six  feet  long  and  two  feet 


HJesert  47 


thick?  What  manner  of  men  could 
have  endured  to  build  this  railway 
over  this  desert,  when  the  torrid 
summer  added  to  its  terrors?  "In- 
dians, Mexicans  —  and  Greeks,"  they 
tell  you,  and  also  that  the  Indian's  is 
often  a  more  trustworthy  labor  than 
the  Mexican's.  What  a  country! 
But  even  here  the  invincible  American 
optimism  prevails.  "When  you  come 
this  way  again,  you  will  see  oranges 
and  roses."  "But  where  will  they  get 
the  water?"  "Oh,  I  dunno.  But 
they'll  get  it."  Meanwhile  there  is 
perhaps  a  less  illusory  hope  in  the 
announcement  that  the  astonishing 
Mr.  Burbank  is  on  the  verge  of  success 
in  producing  a  cactus  without  thorns, 
so  that  it  may  be  despoiled  of  its 
stored  moisture,  and  with  an  edible 
fruit!  We  pass  the  "shack"  of 


48  <§>ut  tKftest 


"Scotty,"  who  is  next  day  to  be  re- 
ported missing.  Scotty  the  private 
prospector  and  finder  of  a  private  mine 
in  the  mountains,  who  pays  himself 
for  his  hardships  and  perils  by  grossly 
squandering  his  gold  in  Los  Angeles, 
on  "forty  dollars'  worth  of  ham  and 
eggs,"  like  another  Coal  Oil  Johnny, 
and  in  the  intervals  of  his  labors  and 
his  orgies  inhabits  a  hovel  to  which  a 
considerate  owner  would  be  loath  to 
consign  his  dog.  And  now  the  cacti 
become  more  luxuriant  and  more 
abundant,  so  as  to  constitute  what 
one  might  call  cactus  orchards  rather 
than  gardens.  And  now  we  pass 

along  the  strip  of  Herbage  strewn 
That  just  divides  the  desert  from  the  sown 

and  are  almost  within  hail  of  San 
Bernardino,  "  the  Garden  Gate,"  when 


5£be  SJesert  49 


the  pleasures  are  presented  to  us  of 
' '  joint  operation ' '  between  rival  roads. 
Hitherto  we  have  been  not  merely  up 
to  but  ahead  of  time  at  every  stop, 
and  our  watchword  has  become,  "The 
time  is  easy."  But  now  we  find  our- 
selves brought  down  to  a  crawl,  and 
at  last  to  a  standstill,  by  the  lagging 
of  the  trains  of  the  rival  A.,  T.  and  S. 
ahead  of  us,  and  the  railroad  men  fume 
and  say  unpleasant  things,  and  we 
begin  to  fear  that  we  shall  have  to  cut 
the  banquet  spread  for  us  at  Riverside. 
When  we  are  at  last  released,  the  ban- 
quet is  quite  out  of  the  question,  but 
we  come  upon  a  jumble  of  three 
wrecked  cars  alongside.  As  a  guaran- 
tee of  good  faith,  the  destruction  ap- 
pears to  be  unimpeachable,  but  it  does 
not  satisfy  our  expert  Thomases,  who 
insist  that  with  the  steam  derrick  that 


50  ©ut  TKflest 


was  available,  a  freight  car  should 
have  been  swung  clear  of  the  track  in 
ten  minutes,  and  even  a  locomotive 
in  twenty.  Dusk  is  already  thicken- 
ing, and  a  little  spatter  of  rain  falling, 
the  first  we  have  seen  or  are  to  see,  as 
we  pass  San  Bernardino.  The  baffled 
host  of  Riverside  makes  himself  and 
us  what  amends  he  may  by  loading  us 
as  we  pass  with  basket  after  basket  of 
the  gorgeous  blossoms,  gigantic  gera- 
niums and  the  like,  which  assure  us 
that  we  are  at  last  in  the  garden  of 
California  and  of  the  world,  and  we 
arrive  at  Los  Angeles  at  last  long  after 
dark,  and  amid  invisible  surroundings. 
Miracles  are  commonplaces  on  the 
second  day,  and  "chestnuts"  on  the 
third.  But  I  cannot  divest  myself  of 
wonder  at  reflecting  that  I  might  have 
seen  the  sun  rise  out  of  the  Atlantic 


Ube  Desert  51 


last  Saturday  morning,  and  set  in  the 
Pacific  this  Wednesday  evening. 

One  sweetly  solemn  thought 
Comes  to  me  o'er  and  o'er; 

I'm  further  West  to-night 
Than  I  have  been  before. 


Day   Fourth 
IN   THE   GARDEN 

The  hospitality  of  Los  Angeles  has 
laid  out  for  us  a  very  strenuous  day, 
so  strenuous  that  of  Los  Angeles  itself 
we  have  only  such  random  glimpses 
as  we  can  snatch  on  our  way  this 
morning  to  the  trolley  station,  which 
is  the  point  of  departure  for  our  ex- 
cursion, and  this  evening  on  the  way 
back  from  it  to  our  hotel  in  the  twilight. 
It  seems  rather  a  pity,  especially  for 
one  who  has  determined  to  break  loose 
from  the  programme  to-morrow  and 
go  up  the  coast  to  San  Francisco  by 
himself,  aided  and  advised  in  his  pro- 
ject by  the  united  railroading  wisdom 
of  the  coast.  The  City  of  the  Angels, 
52 


Garden  53 


the  hustling  American  hastily  abbre- 
viates its  name.  One  wishes  he  had 
not  clipped  it,  but  had  kept  the  whole 
long-tailed  and  mellifluous  designa- 
tion, "Pueblo  de  la  Reina  de  los 
Angeles,"  "Town  of  the  Queen  of  the 
Angels,"  which  was  the  tribute  to  its 
fascinations  of  the  Spanish  settlers  of 
1781.  Half  way  or  so  between  the 
mountains  and  the  sea  —  the  latter 
never  in  sight,  the  former  never  out 
of  it  —  the  high  wall  of  the  Sierra 
Madre,  which  makes  the  desert  of 
yesterday  by  cutting  off  from  it  the 
moisture  that  combines  with  the  per- 
petual sunshine  to  make  a  garden  in 
bloom  all  the  year  round  of  this  stretch 
between  its  westward  slope  and  the 
ocean.  One  admonishes  us  to  take  our 
overcoats,  apologizing  for  the  unusual 
rigor  of  the  weather,  a  rigor  on  the 


54  ®ut 


eve  of  Christmas  like  to  the  rigor  of  a 
sunny  day  in  early  May  on  Man- 
hattan. In  this  favored  region  the 
extreme  range  of  temperature  is  65 
degrees;  the  difference  between  the 
mean  of  the  hottest  and  the  coldest 
month  is  less  than  20  degrees,  from 
51  degrees  in  March  to  70.6  degrees  in 
August.  How  odd  that  no  Angelican 
could  tell  me  the  latitude,  and  that  I 
had  to  wait  for  the  infallible  Stieler  in 
order  to  find  out  that  Los  Angeles  is 
virtually  on  the  parallel  and  also  on 
the  isotherm  of  Wilmington,  N.  C. 

The  trolley  station  is  not  at  all  the 
sort  of  edifice  which  its  name  would 
connote  to  the  Eastern  or  even  to  the 
Middle  Western  ear.  It  is  the  central 
ganglion  of  precisely  the  most  com- 
plete and  comprehensive  system  of 


Gar&en  55 


interurban  and  suburban  electric  com- 
munication which  any  of  us  can  ever 
have  had  the  chance  of  seeing,  and  it 
is  quite  worthy  of  its  function,  one  of 
the  most  conspicuous  of  the  business 
buildings  of  the  town,  with  its  nine 
stories  and  its  ample  area,  the  ground 
floor  given  over  to  the  uses  of  the  elec- 
tric road,  mainly  as  a  huge  waiting 
room  furnished  with  all  the  conven- 
iences of  a  terminal  station  of  a  great 
trunk  line,  and  indeed  more  com- 
pletely furnished  than  more  than  one 
such  terminal  of  which  I  wot.  And 
we  find  a  very  special  conductor,  Mr. 
McMillin,  to  wit,  the  superintendent 
of  the  ''system"  which  ramifies  all 
over  this  region,  from  its  port  of  Santa 
Monica,  twenty  miles  off  to  seaward, 
to  its  eyrie  at  Mount  Lowe,  two-thirds 
or  so  up  toward  the  crest  of  the  Sierra 


56  ©ut 


Madre  and  well  above  low  clouds.  We 
find  also  a  very  special  car,  half  fitted 
with  seats  for  the  habituated,  half 
open  as  an  observatory  for  the 
stranger,  which  latter  half,  being 
planted  with  camp  stools,  makes  the 
whole  quite  capable  of  holding  in  com- 
fort the  forty-odd  passengers  to  which 
our  party  by  local  accessions  has  ex- 
panded. 

Our  first  station  was  San  Gabriel 
Mission.  How  far  it  is  from  Los 
Angeles  I  have  only  the  vaguest  notion. 
What  I  recall  is  that,  when  the  sur- 
roundings were  comparatively  dull, 
we  accelerated  to  fifty,  yes,  sixty  miles 
an  hour.  Sixty  miles  an  hour  on  a 
trolley?  Yes;  and  why  not,  if  you 
have  had  the  wise  and  far-sighted 
liberality  of  the  Pacific  Electric,  and 


Garden  57 


have  acquired  your  private  right  of  way 
instead  of  running  over  the  public  high- 
ways, so  that  you  are  not  reduced,  as 
you  would  be  in  an  automobile  or  an 
uncharted  trolley  car,  to  the  risk  of 
murdering  your  hapless  fellow-man  in 
your  mad  career  ?  And  how  can  I  help 
recalling,  also,  that  the  place  through 
which  we  passed  "was  called  Gan 
Eden,  or  the  Garden  of  Delight"? 
Soothly,  this  is  the  Arabian  Nights 
come  true.  Roses  in  December,  un- 
failing verdure,  perpetual  summer  — 
"boon  nature"  can  no  further  go. 
But  also  the  advantage  that  that  cun- 
ning creature,  man,  has  taken  of  her 
bounty!  These  places  that  we  whizz 
by  are  homes,  homes  equally,  and  it  is 
often  difficult  to  tell,  whether  they  be  of 
those  who  make  their  livings  elsewhere, 
and  are  here  in  "villeggiatura,"  or  of 


58  ©ut  West 


those  suburbans  who  make  their  liv- 
ings in  the  "Town  of  the  Queen  of 
the  Angels,"  and  resort  hither  only 
at  nightfall. 

In  either  case,  all  honor  to  our  Span- 
ish predecessors.  One  shudders  to 
think  what  would  have  happened  if  the 
otiose  Spaniard  had  left  this  country 
to  be  discovered,  as  well  as  exploited, 
by  the  hustling  Yankee.  ' '  There  is  no 
vulgarity  in  Mexico,"  Clarence  King 
used  to  say.  Whose  merit  is  it  but 
that  of  the  Spaniard  that  there  is  no 
vulgarity  in  Southern  California  ?  The 
Spanish  missions  have  furnished  to  the 
American  exploiter  a  keynote  upon 
which,  for  the  benefit  of  all  concerned, 
he  has  been  mercifully  withheld  from 
breaking  in  with  too  wild  a  discord. 
The  Americano,  one  notes  with  satis- 


THE   BELLS  OF  SAN   GABRIEL 


Ube  <Barfcen  59 

faction,  respects  it  even  in  his  architec- 
ture, and  his  best  domestic  design  in 
these  parts  owes  its  spirit  to  the  Span- 
iard. The  Spanish  substratum  fur- 
nishes as  quaint  and  picturesque  a  basis 
for  the  American  superstructure  here, 
as  it  does  in  St.  Augustine,  the  whole 
width  of  the  continent  away.  The 
plastered  walls,  the  gables  pierced  for 
many  bells,  the  plain  timbered  roof  of 
the  Mission  church,  when  we  presently 
reach  it,  though  not  so  plain  as  it 
should  be  and  as  it  was  before  a  rather 
ill-judged  ' '  restoration ' '  —  they  all 
"belong"  not  only  to  the  land,  but  to 
the  original  settlement.  They  all  recall 
the  days  before  the  Gringo,  the  days 
celebrated  in  that  classic,  "Two  Years 
Before  the  Mast,"  in  which,  in  1830, 
long  before  the  Mexican  War,  the 
Mormon  migration,  or  the  discovery  of 


60  ©ut 


gold,  that  "man of  Boston  raisin'  "  and 
of  Harvard  training,  Richard  Henry 
Dana,  celebrated  this  coast  from  San 
Diego  to  San  Francisco,  when  it  pro- 
duced nothing  but  the  wild  cattle 
whose  hides  it  was  his  work  to  store 
and  ship,  and  when  he  was  enough  of  a 
seer  to  foresee  that  if  it  should  ever 
become  settled  by  a  more  progressive 
race  and  civilized  the  Bay  of  San 
Francisco  would  be  its  central  seat  and 
mart.  It  is  true  that,  here  in  San 
Gabriel,  it  is  with  some  sense  of  con- 
tradiction and  incongruity  that  one 
finds,  just  across  the  street  from  the 
Mission  a  modern  American  shop 
where  he  may  buy  most  excellent 
modern  photographs  of  the  Mission. 
It  is  still  more  incongruous  to  find  that 
the  "Padre "  who  lectures  to  you  about 
the  Mission  has  an  unmistakably  Mile- 


<3ar6en  61 


sian  face,  and  an  equally  Milesian 
brogue,  though,  to  be  sure,  it  is  as  true 
of  the  unspoiled  Hibernian  as  of  the 
Iberian  that  there  is  no  vulgarity  in 
him.  But  one  is  greatly  reassured, 
and  "the  scent  of  Old  World  roses" 
reasserts  itself,  and  "local  color"  is 
restored  when  you  encounter  on  the 
street  a  swart,  sombreroed  stranger, 
evidently  ignorant  of  the  uses  of  soap, 
a  full-grown  citizen  who  exhibits  appre- 
hension and  dismay  at  being  accosted 
in  the  English  language,  and  who 
answers  you  haltingly,  with  an  evident 
effort  of  translation. 

The  next  stage  in  the  Pilgrim's 
Progress  for  the  day  is  the  Santa  Anita 
Ranch  of  Mr.  Baldwin,  of  whom  I  am 
ashamed  to  say  that  I  do  not  know  the 
Christian  name,  since  all  men  call  him 
merely  "Lucky.  "  One  has  seen  in  his 


62  <smt  West 


time  his  share  of  "swell"  places,  in- 
habited by  Dukes  and  the  like  in  their 
seasons,  but  surely  no  "swell  place" 
which  so  bears  the  stamp  of  ' '  Liberty, 
Equality,  and  Fraternity"  as  this. 
The  "domain,"  as  they  say  on  the 
other  side,  the  ranch,  as  they  say  here, 
is  of  some  40,000  acres,  and  the  owner 
seems  to  keep  it  all  for  the  pleasure 
of  his  fellow-citizens  as  much  as  for  his 
own.  Nothing,  apparently,  is  closed 
to  visitors  but  the  actual  dwelling,  a 
studiously  unpretentious  bungalow  of 
a  single  story,  the  exterior  of  which 
does  not  excite  one's  curiosity  about 
the  interior  when  there  is  such  an 
enormous  deal  to  be  seen  outside. 
How  much  there  is  to  be  seen  outside! 
It  is  true  that  the  owner  has  not  yet 
seen  his  way  to  running  trolley  lines 
through  his  estate.  "II  ne  manquait 


(Barfcen  63 


que  cela."  Tallyho  coaches,  however, 
under  the  Jehuship  of  lineal  descend- 
ants of  the  driver  of  Horace  Greeley 
across  the  mountains,  and  for  that 
matter  of  the  son  of  Nimshi  himself, 
bear  us  furiously,  and  at  times,  when 
the  road  is  less  level  than  its  wont, 
hair-raisingly  through  the  avenues  of 
the  domain.  Avenues  bordered  with 
orange  trees  and  lemon  trees  in  full 
leaf  and  fruitage,  with  walnut  trees, 
with  pepper  trees,  those  pendulous  and 
picturesque  vegetables-  which  not  all 
of  us  have  seen  before,  with  their  droop- 
ing foliage  and  their  scarlet  pods, 
avenues  of  poplar  and  of  palm,  vast 
patches  of  whatever  crops,  one  is 
tempted  to  say,  will  grow  for  the  use  of 
man  in  any  clime.  And  we  are  shown 
animal  as  well  as  vegetable  '  '  California 
products,"  and  in  equal  perfection. 


64  ©ut  Wtest 


"Bunches "  of  mules  and  horned  cattle, 
of  the  best  breeds,  we  have  been  seeing 
all  about  the  ranch.  But  here  is  a 
special  stable  out  of  which  are  solemnly 
led  such  historical  quadrupeds  as  Em- 
peror of  Norfolk,  which  in  his  time 
won  $200,000  for  his  lucky  owner  on  the 
Eastern  turf,  and  has  since  justified 
himself  of  his  "get,"  and  El  Rey  de 
Santa  Anita,  of  a  record  only  less 
distinguished,  cherished  now  as  be- 
comes their  past,  and  not  without  hope 
for  the  future  in  their  progeny  yet  to 
be.  One  learns  with  satisfaction  that 
the  noble  owner  who  employs  some 
hundreds  of  workmen  in  "keeping  up" 
an  estate  many  times  as  large  as  Central 
Park,  and  as  scrupulously  kept,  and 
who  acquired  it  as  a  means  of  spend- 
ing money,  is  in  the  way  to  make 
money  out  of  it  by  cutting  it  up  for 


(Barben  65 


villa  sites  for  the  Easterners  who 
have  succumbed  to  the  fascinations  of 
this  fascinating  land. 

One  of  these  Easterners  occurred  at 
the  next  number  on  our  programme, 
that  luncheon  at  the  Hotel  Maryland 
which  established  that  besides  those 
citrous  and  pomological  products  pe- 
culiar, in  their  degree,  to  Southern  Cali- 
fornia there  are  to  be  had  there  fish 
and  flesh  and  fowl  quite  equal  after 
their  kinds  to  the  best  productions  of 
the  East  or  of  the  Middle  West.  It  was 
an  old  friend  and  co-Centurion  who, 
happening  to  visit  the  coast  last  year, 
fell  an  unresisting  victim  to  its  charms, 
took  a  house  in  Pasadena  on  a  lease 
running  from  November  to  April,  and 
now  declares  that  he  is  not  going  back 
to  New  York  "until  he  has  to."  He 


66  ©ut  TKftest 


bore  me  from  the  banquet  hall  in  his 
fleet  automobile  to  his  own  cottage, 
through  the  wonderful  avenues  of  Pasa- 
dena, bordered  with  live  oaks,  dodging 
the  luxuriant  live  oak  which  the  layers- 
out  of  the  avenues  have  had  the  sense 
to  leave  standing  in  the  middle  of  the 
road,  past  untold  hundreds  of  homes, 
over  roads  which  seem  to  be  asphalted 
but  are  in  fact  merely  oiled  in  the 
middle  for  the  diminution  of  friction 
and  the  avoidance  of  dust,  to  the 
southeastward-opening  veranda  of  the 
Country  Club,  where  the  outlook  across 
the  valley  is  at  its  finest,  toward  the 
"saw"  of  the  Madre,  with  its  perma- 
nently snow-capped  peak  of  "Old 
Baldy,"  which  has  abided  in  our  sub- 
consciousness  all  the  morning.  We  can 
not  only  see ' '  Mount  Lowe, ' '  the  station 
more  than  half  way  up,  and  often  above 


Ube  <5ar£>en  67 

the  clouds,  which  is  the  mountain 
terminus  of  the  Pacific  Electric;  we 
can  also  see  and  distinguish  by  its  white 
scarp  on  the  cliff  the  still  higher 
"Mount  Wilson,"  attainable  only  on 
foot  or  mule  back,  which  the  Trustees 
of  the  Carnegie  Fund  have  chosen  as 
precisely  the  most  eligible  place  in  the 
United  States  for  the  establishment 
of  an  astronomical  observatory,  and 
where  they  have  spent  two  years' 
income  of  the  fund  in  establishing  the 
observatory  of  which  the  white  side 
gleams  to  us  from  the  summit,  an 
observatory  for  which  even  now  the 
experimental  grinding  of  a  five-foot 
lens  beyond  the  dreams  of  Alvah  Clark 
is  in  progress.  Where  on  earth  is  the 
Earthly  Paradise,  the  Happy  Valley, 
if  not  precisely  this  which  lies  open  to 
the  tropical  sun  between  us  and  that 


68  ©Ut 


ridge,  dotted  with  groves  green  in 
December  and  with  human  habita- 
tions ?  And  the  human  habitations  are 
another  trophy  of  Triumphant  Demo- 
cracy, a  perfectly  American  aggre- 
gation. In  the  mass  they  make  the 
same  impression  of  Equality  and  Fra- 
ternity that  they  make  in  detail. 
They  are  not,  none  of  them  is,  beyond 
the  legitimate  aspiration  of  the  frugal 
and  industrious  American  born  to  no 
birthright  but  that  of  his  citizenship. 
They  are  redeemed  from  vulgarity  by 
the  genius  of  the  place,  perhaps  particu- 
larly by  the  influence  of  our  Spanish 
predecessors,  expressed  in  that  Mission 
architecture  which  is  the  negation  at 
once  of  luxury  and  of  vulgarity.  How 
welcomely  unlike  they  are  to  that 
absurd  and  vulgar  huddle,  on  the  cliffs 
of  Newport,  of  palaces  of  which  for  its 


Ube  <5art>en  69 


proper  framing  and  display  every  one 
needs,  not  a  "villa  plot,"  but  the  frame 
and  setting  of  a  great  park! 

Mr.  Cawston's  ostrich  farm  at  South 
Pasadena,  though  in  sooth  it  is  rather 
a  show  room  than  a  farm,  the  main 
breeding  place  being  back  in  the 
mountains,  and  only  a  hundred  and 
fifty  birds  or  so  being  on  view  here, 
is  one  of  the  sights  of  the  region,  wel- 
come for  its  intrinsic  interest  and  wel- 
come also  as  a  proof  that  anything 
that  will  thrive  anywhere  will  thrive 
in  this  enchanted  land.  Thrive  they 
clearly  do,  whether  they  be  of  the 
black-necked  South  African  or  of  the 
red-necked  Nubian  variety,  all  alike 
rubber-necked,  figuratively  as  well  as 
literally,  and  making  test  of  any  new 
object  by  the  infantile  process  of 


70  ©ut  West 


swallowing  it  or  trying  to.  It  is  a 
sight  to  see  one  of  them  "fielding"  an 
orange,  and  to  watch  the  undigested 
globe  slipping  down  the  side  of  his 
absurd  neck  to  tussle  with  the  dissol- 
vent power  of  his  gastric  juices.  "The 
proper  way  to  take  a  high  ball,"  mur- 
murs one  envious  and  emulous  un- 
feathered  biped.  The  new-fledged 
chicks  are  as  greedy  and  as  indiscrimi- 
nate as  their  elders.  The  chicks  are 
said  to  be  good  to  eat,  though  of 
course  they  are  too  valuable  as  feather 
bearers  to  be  put  to  that  use.  The 
adults  are  not,  for  Mr.  Cawston,  the 
enterprising  Englishman  who  has  made 
the  experiment,  relates  that  an  adult 
or  two  accidentally  died  on  the  voyage 
out  in  a  sailing  ship,  and  their  bodies 
were  given  to  and  rejected  by  the 
foremast  hands.  Mr.  Cawston's  con- 


71 


elusion  looks  warranted  that  what  a 
sailor  will  not  eat  is  not  edible.  An 
ostrich  egg,  however,  should  make  an 
omelet  eligible  and  sufficient  for  a 
party,  say,  of  a  dozen,  estimating 
by  the  hen's  egg  that  is  put  along- 
side of  it  in  the  photograph  to  "give 
scale." 

And  at  the  ostrich  farm  my  com- 
panions recur,  and  we  whizz  in  to 
Los  Angeles  again,  the  dusk  by  this 
time  setting  in,  to  prepare  for  the 
press  banquet;  but  we  return  hope- 
lessly smitten,  like  everybody  else, 
with  the  charms  of  this  land,  and 
with  a  fixed  determination,  also  like 
everybody  else,  to  come  back  and 
end  our  days  on  this  enchanted 
shore. 


72  ©ut  West 


Kennst  du  das  Land  wo  die  Citronen  bliih'n? 
Im  dunklen  Latib  die  Goldorangen  gluh'n, 
Bin  sanfter  Wind  vom  blauen  Himmel  weht, 
Die  Myrthe  still,  und  hoch  die  Lorbeer  steht. 

Kennst  du  es  wohl!  Dahin,  dahin, 
Mocht  ich  mit  dir,  O  meine  Liebe,  ziehn. 


Day   Fifth 
UP  THE   COAST 

A  "banquet"  of  which  the  hall  is 
not  deserted  until  after  'midnight  is 
not  the  best  preparation  for  beginning 
to  see  scenery  at  8  A.M.,  which  was  the 
inexorable  hour  at  which,  after  making 
my  packets,  my  train  was  to  bear  me 
forth  of  the  City  of  the  Angels  and  up 
the  coast  to  San  Francisco.  Forbye 
that  when  one  has  been  rocked  for 
four  nights  by  Alma  Pullman,  he 
misses  her  lullaby  and  does  not  sleep 
very  well  in  a  bed.  When  the  pas- 
senger on  the  Coast  Line  really 
awakens  to  a-sense  of  his  surroundings, 
he  is  passing  through  a  country  much 
like  the  garden  of  yesterday,  "lands  of 

73 


74  ©ut  West 


palm,  of  orange  blossom,  of  olive,  aloe, 
and  maize  and  vine,"  past  stations  of 
the  queerly  mixed  Spanish  and  Gringo 
nomenclature.  Oxnard,  of  anti-Cuban 
reciprocity  memory,  for  example,  is 
sandwiched  in  between  Hueneme  and 
Montalvo.  It  is  10.19  of  December 
morning  by  he  time-table  when  you 
learn,  by  the  capital  map  the  Southern 
Pacific  provides  for  the  earnest  seeker, 
that  you  are  approaching  San  Buena 
Ventura.  You  have  just  time  to  bluff 
a  translation  as  "Holy  Good  Luck" 
when  the  translation  justifies  itself. 
"Thalatta,  Thalatta;  by  Jove,  I  saw 
the  sea,"  as  Kinglake  has  it  in  that 
famous  burst  in  "Eothen."  Like 
stout  Balboa,  and  only  a  trifling  matter 
of  some  392  years  behind  him,  I,  too, 
"stared  at  the  Pacific."  For  the  en- 
suing six  hours  of  daylight  that  jour- 


tbe  Coast  75 


ney  was  a  delightful  dream.  One  is 
prone,  ungratefully,  to  exclaim,  the  best 
of  all  these  days  of  which  each  is  the 
best.  Blue  is  the  Pacific,  the  greatest 
expanse  upon  this  planet  of  ours,  with 
a  blueness  quite  unknown  to  the  so- 
journers  by  the  misty  coast  of  the  sad 
North  Atlantic,  and  beautiful  with  a 
beauty  as  far  beyond.  Nobody  that 
I  know  has  done  justice  to  it  by  pen 
or  even  by  brush,  though  the  latter  is 
the  more  eligible  utensil.  You  would 
know  at  once,  and  quite  apart  from 
the  solecism  of  going  North  with  the 
ocean  on  your  left  hand,  that  this 
summer  sea  was  not  the  Atlantic  you 
had  left,  where  the  line  of  division 
between  sea  and  sky  is  always  a  some- 
what misty  zone,  whereas  here,  as  on 
the  great  lakes,  the  rim  of  the  horizon 
is  starkly  clear.  There  is  no  "melan- 


76  ©ut  West 


choly  wash  of  endless  waves"  about 
this  sunlit  sparkle  of  sapphire  and 
silver.  You  remember  Stevenson's 
"On  the  Beach  at  Monterey,"  Mon- 
terey of  which  we  are  presently  to  pass 
far  to  the  inland.  The  lines  are  among 
the  most  nearly  successful  of  his  es- 
says in  verse,  but  they  read  as  if  he 
had  never  seen  the  Pacific: 

Now  that  you  have  spelt  your  lesson,  lay  it 

down  and  go  and  play, 
Seeking  shells  and  seaweed  on  the  sands  of 

Monterey ; 
Watching  all  the  mighty  whalebones,  lying 

buried  by  the  breeze, 
Tiny  sandpipers  and  the  huge  Pacific  seas. 

What  have  the  "huge  Pacific  seas" 
to  do  with  this  coast,  where  even  in 
late  December  the  "sunny  waters" 
"only  heave  with  a  summer  swell"? 
Clarence  King's  prose,  in  "Mountain- 


"dp  tbe  Coast  77 

eering  in  the  Sierra  Nevada,"  is  much 
more  to  the  point: 

The  western  margin  of  this  continent  is 
built  of  a  series  of  mountain  chains  folded  in 
broad  corrugations,  like  waves  of  stone  upon 
whose  seaward  base  beat  the  mild,  small 
breakers  of  the  Pacific. 

All  the  same,  I  wish  Stevenson  had 
my  present  task  of  trying  to  convey 
in  prose  some  sense  of  the  charm  of 
this  loveliest  of  all  the  coasts  of  all  the 
seas.  How  beautifully  he  would  do 
it!  And  how  beautifully  it  ought  to 
be  done!  There  has  been  much  good 
verse  written  about  the  coast  of  Italy 
which  the  passenger  along  this  coast 
finds  himself  mentally  transferring  to 
it,  as  mile  after  mile  of  tranquil  and 
varied  and  not  insipid  beauty  passes 
him  in  review  during  the  five  hours  of 
daylight,  for  the  150  miles  of  space 


78  ©ut  West 


that  intervene  between  the  "Holy 
Good  Luck"  which  brings  him  upon 
the  coast  and  the  San  Luis  Obispo, 
where  he  leaves  it  to  deviate  in- 
land and  upland.  Buchanan  Read's 
"Drifting"  and  Tennyson's  "Daisy" 
recur  to  him  mile  by  mile  as  poetry 
which  this  panorama  must  have  in- 
spired. From  the  latter  I  have 
already  quoted,  but  I  must  quote 
again,  so  redolent  is  it  of  this  atmo- 
sphere and  so  reflective  of  this  land- 
scape: 

Distant  color,  happy  hamlet, 
A  moldered  citadel  on  the  coast, 

Or  tower,  or  high  hill  convent,  seen 
A  light  amid  its  olives  green ; 

Or  olive-hoary  cape  in  ocean 
Or  rosy  blossom  in  hot  ravine. 

Here  is  a  station,  called,  inevitably, 
for  a  namer  who  had  a  sense  of  the  fit- 


tbe  Coast  79 


ness  of  things,  "Surf,"  where  some 
lucky  conformation  of  the  bottom 
causes  the  white  horses  to  shake  their 
manes  far  out  at  sea,  and  to  roll  in  in 
successions  of  white,  yeasty  foam,  with 
such  an  effect  of  contrast  between 
them  and  the  blue  beyond  and  between 
as  surely  one  has  never  seen  elsewhere 
or  before.  Here  is  a  green  promontory 
jutting  out  into  the  blue,  just  large 
enough  to  hold  the  little  fruitful 
garden  patch,  the  little  white-washed 
cottage,  and  the  white  shaft  of  the 
pharos  of  the  happy  and  enviable 
lighthouse  keeper.  Here  is  a  blue  inlet 
which,  cutting  far  into  the  mainland, 
vividly  brings  back  the  "Last  Valley" 
at  Newport,  whether  in  its  actual  as- 
pect or  in  Mr.  La  Farge's  reproduction 
of  its  effect.  In  truth,  the  impression 
of  this  coast  is  that  of  Newport,  of  a 


8o  ©lit  Mest 


hundred  miles  of  a  magnified  but  not 
distorted  Newport,  the  only  stretch  of 
the  Atlantic  seaboard  which  can  for  a 
moment  be  compared  with  it.  The 
impression  is  the  same  impression  of 
suavity  and  "elegance  "  and  gracious- 
ness.  There  is  nothing  forbidding 
about  these  rounded  hills ;  contrariwise 
something  neighborly  and  sociable  and 
inviting.  One  might  still  liken  them, 
as  I  likened  those  terrible  lands  of 
Wyoming,  to  elephants,  but  now  to  re- 
cumbent green  elephants,  facing  you; 
rounded,  even  "quilted"  elephants,  fac- 
ing you,  aligned  in  order,  "elephants 
a-grazing,"  and  stretching  out  their 
proboscides  downward  to  the  train  and 
the  shore  as  if  in  quest  of  the  votive 
peanut,  the  illusion  being  assisted  by  the 
casual  cow  or  sheep,  grazing  in  a  nostril 
or  an  eye,  and  in  scale  with  the  flea 


Tap  tbe  Coast  81 

which  would  be  likely  to  infest  the  actual 
animal.  Truly,  if  I  had  been  brought 
out  blindfold  from  New  York,  and  had 
seen  nothing  but  this  five  hours'  pano- 
rama of  "The  Coast,"  I  should  think 
my  journey  well  repaid.  They  already 
call  Southern  California  "the  Italy  of 
America."  When  they  come  to  call- 
ing Italy  the  Southern  California  of 
Europe,  the  claims  of  poetical  and 
pictorial  justice  will  be  nearer  their 
satisfaction.  General  Chaffee  has  just 
endeared  himself  anew,  as  I  read  in 
this  day's  papers,  to  the  coast,  to 
which  he  was  endeared  before,  as  to  all 
other  parts  of  his  country,  by  declining 
Mayor  McClellan's  offer  of  an  office, 
upon  the  ground  that  he  was  going 
back  to  "good  old  California."  Good 
old  General! 

A  neighbor  on  the  train,  with  whom 


82  ©ut  "Mest 


I  fall  into  talk,  sheds  light  on  several 
things.  He  is  a  typical  Coaster,  born 
"back  East,"  came  out  here  as  a 
trooper  in  the  Fourth  Cavalry,  hap- 
pened to  be  here  when  he  was  dis- 
charged, thirty-five  years  ago,  settled, 
has  been  dabbling  since  in  ' '  mining  and 
stock  raising,"  and  now,  at  the  fifty- 
five  years  which  naturally  accrue  to 
him  after  that  experience,  evidently, 
though  not  at  all  ostentatiously,  finds 
himself,  as  the  French  locution  is,  "at 
his  ease."  This  country,  he  tells  me, 
meaning  Southern  California,  and 
being  himself  a  San  Franciscan,  is  a 
good  place  to  wind  up  in.  That  is 
what  it  is  for.  But  it  is  no  place  to 
begin  at  any  more.  These  Swedes  who 
come  out  here  to  get  a  homestead,  and 
find  that  land  is  $200  an  acre,  and  that 
they  can't  buy  less  than  a  thousand 


"dp  tbe  Coast  83 

acres  —  well,  they  go  somewhere  else. 
And  to  my  inquiry  whether  perpetual 
summer  was  not  enervating  of  the 
human  energies,  he  makes  thought- 
ful answer:  "Oh,  yes.  They  do  get 
damn  lazy," 

We  turn  inland  at  last,  after  this 
vision  of  beauty  beyond  our  imagina- 
tion, but  only  to  exchange  it  for 
another  beauty  and  another  interest. 
In  the  first  fourteen  miles  after  leaving 
San  Luis  Obispo  we  climb  1,400  feet, 
and,  as  it  looks  to  me,  box  the  com- 
pass three  or  four  times.  My  friend 
"Louis,"  the  train  boy,  whom  all  the 
habitual  passengers  know  by  that 
name  and  whom  I  know  by  no  other, 
the  only  "train  boy"  I  have  ever  en- 
countered who  was  not  a  public  nui- 
sance, whereas  he  is  one  of  the  most 


84  ©ut  West 


enlightening  and  agreeable  of  ciceroni, 
with  whom  it  is  a  privilege  to  travel  — 
my  friend  Louis,  who,  during  this  de- 
lightful day,  has  sold  me  sundry  dol- 
lars' worth  of  literature  and  art  which 
I  really  needed,  but  which  I  should 
assuredly  have  flung  back  if  presented 
to  me  by  the  usual  train  boy  —  my 
friend  Louis,  I  repeat,  to  whom,  if 
these  lines  should  meet  his  eye,  I 
desire  to  confess  my  personal  obliga- 
tions and  to  call  the  attention  of  the 
authorities  of  the  Southern  Pacific 
Railroad  to  his  merits,  is  kind  enough, 
at  this  juncture,  to  come  aft  and  point 
out  to  me  the  old  stage  trail,  winding 
and  zigzagging  in  general  conformity 
with  the  course  of  our  train,  within  our 
windings  and  commonly  below  them. 
I  am  in  "Bret  Harte's  country."  Not 
literally,  for  he  "operated"  mainly  in 


TDlp  tbe  Coast  85 

the  Sacramento  Valley,  beyond  San 
Francisco,  or  on  the  other  side  of  the 
range.  But  the  old  stage  route  brings 
us  near  akin.  And  Louis  tells  me  a 
tale  of  the  days  when  the  stage  route 
was  already  obsolescent,  tells  it  in 
view  of  the  oak  tree  which  was  the 
hero  of  the  tale.  "Yuba  Dam,"  says 
Louis,  or  possibly  Profane  Bill,  "was 
drivin'  a  party  of  school-moms  through 
here  on  an  excursion.  Just  here,  one 
of  'em  says,  '  Mr.  Dam,  didn't  you  use 
to  be  robbed  hereabouts  in  old  times  ? ' 
'Betcherlife,'  says  Yuba,  'and  not  such 
old  times,  neither.  Three  months  ago 
I  was  held  up .'  '  My !  Where  did  they 
waylay  you?'  'Mostly  by  that  big 
tree  right  there  —  and  there  is  the 
galoot  now.'  And,"  concludes  Louis, 
"and  he  was."  After  that  I  can  no 
more  regard  myself  as  a  tenderfoot 


86  ©ut  West 


than  the  maiden  lady  in  Stevenson's 
tale  could  regard  herself  as  a  maiden 
lady  after  she  had  heard  the  Commis- 
sary of  Police  swearing  at  night  out  of 
his  window.  Dear  reader  and  possible 
follower,  whatever  happens,  do  not  let 
anybody  persuade  you  to  go  from  Los 
Angeles  to  San  Francisco  either  by  the 
Valley  Route  or  by  a  nefarious  "Owl 
Train"  which  runs  through  all  this 
splendor  in  the  darkness. 

Too  much  beauty,  taken  in  too  big 
gulps,  is  as  cloying  as  any  other  surfeit. 
Wherefore  the  amateur  of  his  own  sensa- 
tions is  relieved  to  find  that  the  Decem- 
ber day  is  no  longer,  and  that  the  dark 
is  settling,  though  he  must  pause  to  note 
with  pleasure,  that  one  of  the  undistin- 
guished stations  we  have  passed  is,  by 
the  piety  of  the  California  he  celebrated, 


'dp  tbe  Coast  87 

named  "Nordhoff,"  after  that  high- 
minded  and  patriotic  man  who  had 
praised  his  Calif ornians,  as  who  could 
fail  to  do  who  knew  them,  and  who,  an 
old  man,  broken  with  the  storms  of 
journalism,  came  here  to  lay  his  weary 
bones  among  them.  But  it  is  a  distinct 
relief  that  the  darkness  closes  in  before 
we  can  see  the  Santa  Clara, ' '  the  richest 
valley  in  California,"  which  we  are 
condoled  with  upon  missing.  Heaven 
knows  we  are  not,  since  yesterday, 
' '  short ' '  of  rich  valleys.  ' '  Utter  dark- 
ness" does  us  a  favor  in  "closing  her 
wing"  so  timely  that  there  is  not,  from 
here  to  San  Francisco,  anything  we  are 
obliged  to  admire.  These  condolences 
are  misplaced. 

Surely,    after   the   strenuous  hospi- 
tality of  Los  Angeles  all  day  yesterday 


88 


and  most  of  last  night,  one  has  nothing 
to  ask  of  the  Palace  Hotel  in  San  Fran- 
cisco but  a  place  to  sleep  when  he 
drives  to  it  at  10.30  P.M.  They  tell 
me,  by  the  way,  that  I  should  not 
have  come  here,  but  to  the  Saint 
Francis,  which,  just  now,  while  the 
opening  of  the  Fairmount,  which  is  to 
be  the  tiptop  of  Franciscan  hotel  keep- 
ing, is  still  in  abeyance,  is  the  only  cor- 
rect thing.  But,  San  Buena  Ventura! 
What  should  I  have  missed  if  I  had 
gone  anywhere  else?  The  uncove- 
nanted  mercy  of  the  assemblage  of  the 
beauty  and  fashion  of  San  Francisco 
at  the  Palace  Hotel  at  some  social 
function  of  the  name  and  nature  of 
which  I  am  gladly  ignorant,  but  which 
enabled  me  to  watch  for  an  hour  the 
San  Franciscan  procession  of  women 
through  the  corridors  of  this  "battered 


"dp  tbe  Coast  89 

caravanserai,"  how  can  one  be  thank- 
ful enough  for  that  ?  To  be  sure,  they 
wore  their  wraps,  though  that  scarcely 
mattered.  There  was  a  screen  erected 
between  the  great  court  of  the  hotel 
and  the  ballroom  at  the  rear,  which 
screen  concealed  the  dancers,  but  did 
not  conceal  the  "floral  decorations." 
The  floral  decorations  were  a  wealth  of 
tropical  bloom  which  would  have  cost 
a  king's  ransom  in  New  York,  if  they 
could  have  been  had  there  at  all,  which 
at  this  season  they  could  not.  But 
what  I  looked  at,  and  what  I  still  recall, 
is  that  procession  of  the  women  of  San 
Francisco.  Some  fifteen  years  ago  Mr. 
Kipling  recorded  his  belief  that  San 
Francisco  was  "inhabited  by  a  per- 
fectly insane  people,  whose  women 
are  of  a  remarkable  beauty."  To  the 
latter  branch  of  the  proposition  nobody 


90  ©ut  West 


with  my  opportunities  for  observa- 
tion could  possibly  prevent  himself  from 
subscribing.  For  an  hour  or  so  that 
procession  defiled  by  me.  There  was 
scarcely  one  female  processionist,  from 
eighteen  to  sixty,  who  was  "plain"  or 
commonplace.  The  rank  and  file  were 
tributes  more  cogent  than  a  "mon- 
strous turnip  or  giant  pine"  to  the 
influence  of  the  soil  and  the  climate, 
"California  products"  about  which 
there  is  no  disputing,  "magnificent 
specimens."  Dear  sisters  of  our  own 
Four  Hundred,  as  one  sees  your  round- 
ups in  the  glittering  horseshoe's  ample 
round  of  the  Metropolitan  Opera  House, 
on  the  East  Drive  of  Central  Park,  in 
the  ballroom  which  the  elderly  philoso- 
pher may  occasionally  be  inveigled 
into  visiting,  at  the  Horse  Show,  which 
not  so  long  ago  was  known  as  a  Beauty 


TUp  tbe  Coast  91 

Show,  let  nobody  delude  you  into 
opening  this  latter  to  bipedal  as  well  as 
quadrupedal  continental  competition. 
Painful  as  the  confession  may  be  to  a 
Manhattanese,  you  will  not  be  in  it 
with  these  ' '  California  products. ' '  You 
will  be,  I  will  not  say  outdressed,  but 
"outlooked"  and  even  "outstyled." 
At  the  end  of  this  day  of  superla- 
tive natural  beauty,  it  is  neverthe- 
less a  patriotic  privilege  to  come  upon 
this  assemblage  of  human  beauty, 
and  to  remember  gratefully  Mr. 
Myers's  heartfelt  British  tribute  to 
the  American  woman  whom  we  have 
been  seeing  in  her  most  impressive 
avatar : 

Spread  then,  Great  Land,  thine  arms  afar, 
Thy  golden  harvests  westward  roll; 

Banner  with  banner,  star  with  star, 
Ally  the  tropics  and  the  pole ; 


92  ©ut  Meat 


There  glows  no  gem  than  these  more  bright 
From  ice  to  fire,  from  sea  to  sea; 

Blossoms  no  fairer  flower  to  light 
Through  all  thine  endless  empery. 


Day   Sixth 
THE    GOLDEN   GATE* 

Here  we  are  at  last  at  the  Golden 
Gate, ' '  at  the  land's  end  and  the  world's 
end  and  the  end  of  the  Aryan  migra- 
tion," as  is  set  forth  in  "The  Helmet 
of  Mambrino."  At  the  one  angle  of  a 
triangle  of  which  the  other  two  are  the 
City  of  the  Angels  and  the  City  of  the 
Saints,  nobody  has  pretended  to  find  in 
San  Francisco  much  affinity  with  either. 
It  is,  on  the  contrary,  frankly  mundane, 
"wide  open"  with  a  width  of  openness 
beyond  the  dreams  of  Tammany,  and 

*  Written,  the  reader  will  observe,  some  months 
before  the  awful  calamity  which  destroyed  the  city 
it  describes.  But  it  seems  best  to  let  it  stand  as 
written,  as  a  traveler's  impression  of  the  San  Fran- 
cisco that  was. 

93 


94  ©ut  IKIlest 


boasts  itself,  and  one  judges  with 
reason,  to  be  the  most  cosmopolitan  of 
all  the  towns  of  a  country  which  is  itself 
a  cosmos  in  attracting  strangers  from 
all  lands.  In  the  seven  hours  or  so  of 
December  daylight  which  are  left  one 
between  a  late  and  leisurely  breakfast 
and  the  dark,  nay,  between  that  meal 
and  the  departure  of  his  train,  one  has 
no  time  for  Oakland  or  Berkeley,  not 
even  for  the  Cliff  House  and  the 
Golden  Gate  Park,  which  are  the  boasts 
of  San  Francisco  itself.  It  is  open  to 
him  only,  in  the  language  of  the 
Psalmist,  to  "grin  like  a  dog  and  run 
about  the  city."  The  provision  for 
running  about  the  city  is  not  so  ample 
as  one  finds  in  the  Middle  West,  or 
even  in  the  effete  East,  being  the  obso- 
lescent cable  car  mainly,  and  even  one 
sees  the  elsewhere-for-that-purpose  ob- 


(Bolfcen  Gate  95 


solete  horse  still  employed  as  an  instru- 
ment of  public  traction.  There  has 
been  a  "seeing  San  Francisco"  auto- 
mobile service,  but  I  learn  that  it  has 
languished  and  been  abandoned;  and 
there  is  another,  just  starting,  which 
boasts  itself  to  have  '  '  the  largest  auto- 
mobile on  the  Coast,  seating  twenty 
persons,"  half  as  many  as  one  can  see 
any  day  swarming  on  one  of  the  obser- 
vation automobiles  in  Broadway,  and 
drinking  in  the  megaphonous  eloquence 
of  the  barker.  But  I  happened  to  fall 
between  these  two  stools,  and,  the 
private  automobile  at  $5  per  hour 
being  rather  too  rich  for  my  blood,  I 
fulfilled  for  the  most  part  literally  the 
Psalmist's  description,  and  did  not 
regret  it,  dividing  my  few  hours  be- 
tween the  "business  center"  and  the 
"swell"  residential  quarter,  and  find- 


96  ©ut  West 


ing  in  each  reason  to  regret  the  brevity 
of  my  sojourn. 

San  Francisco  has  been  much  written 
about,  and  by  great  writers.  Bret 
Harte,  Stevenson,  and  Kipling  are 
compelling  names.  And  yet  I  find 
that  I  have  derived  from  reading  no 
real  notion  of  the  place. 

The  flimsy  architecture  of  a  mining 
camp  survives  in  great  quantities  to 
disturb  the  impression  of  a  modern 
city,  and  even  to  endanger  more  per- 
manent and  more  valuable  erections. 
The  early  magnates  of  "Nob  Hill "  had 
the  crudity  of  their  own  architectural 
tastes  reinforced  by  the  general  belief 
that  frame  buildings  were  the  most 
trustworthy  against  earthquakes,  and 
they  put  up  balloon  frames  and  went 
to  wild  excesses  in  jig-sawyery  by  way 


tlbe  <5ott>en  (Bate  97 

of  spending  money.  There  is  much 
crudity  left  even  in  the  commercial 
center,  though  there,  and  there  alone, 
there  does  not  seem  to  be  left  any 
dangerous  combustibility.  The  mon- 
strous Palace  Hotel,  a  monument,  I 
suppose,  of  the  early  seventies,  is  highly 
characteristic,  with  its  seven-story 
court,  which  the  architect  probably 
called  a  "patio,"  surrounded  by  balco- 
nies, and  these  in  turn  with  bedrooms, 
of  which  it  is  a  detail  in  the  general 
splendiferousness  that  they  are  dark 
cells,  in  which  you  cannot  even  see 
your  way  about  without  artificial  light. 

The  same  architectural  anarchy  that 
characterizes  the  building  of  other 
American  cities  signalizes  that  of  San 
Francisco,  and  yet  more  abundantly. 
Individualism  is  more  rampant  and 


98  ©ut  West 


civism  more  discouraged  than  in  New 
York  or  Chicago.  The  architectural 
lions  of  the  place,  apart  from  the 
admirable  Ferry  Station,  which  a  repro- 
duction of  the  Giralda  of  Seville  crowns 
as  it  crowns  the  Madison  Square 
Garden,  and  even  more  effectively  by 
dint  of  the  greater  effectiveness  of  its 
isolated  and  conspicuous  site  —  the 
"lions"  are  the  three  newspaper  build- 
ings, of  which  two  are  officially  known 
by  other  names  than  those  of  the  news- 
papers, but  all  popularly  by  their  news- 
paper names.  Each  of  them  has  its 
interest,  but  none  of  them  has  any- 
thing architecturally  to  do  with  either 
of  the  others.  Intrinsically  the  Hearst 
Building  is  not  only  the  most  interest- 
ing and  attractive  of  them,  but  also  it 
affords  by  its  graceful  and  skillful  recall 
of  the  architecture  of  the  original  Span- 


Golfcen  Gate  99 


ish  settlement  the  most  eligible  point  of 
departure  for  the  commercial  architec- 
ture of  San  Francisco,  when  it  shall 
cease  to  be  chaotic.  The  Crocker  Build- 
ing is  a  favorable  example  of  the  con- 
ventional treatment  of  the  skyscraper, 
in  which  it  is  still  represented  as  a  build- 
ing of  masonry  instead  of  a  frame  build- 
ing, and  the  actual  masonry  of  the  great 
commercial  concerns  is  exemplary  for 
its  straightforward  rationality  of  design. 

Besides  its  wooden  flimsiness  the  up- 
and-downness  of  San  Francisco  is  the 
feature  for  which  I  was  not  fully  pre- 
pared. This  unevenness  has  queer  con- 
sequences. For  example,  the  "swell" 
quarter  —  Jackson  Street  and  Pacific 
Avenue  far  up  the  hill  and  their  connect- 
ing streets  —  crowned,  really  with  an 
Acropolitan  effectiveness,  by  the  ranged 


®ut  West 


stories  and  wings  of  the  still  incomplete 
"Fairmount"  —  this  swell  quarter 
takes  its  rise  from  "Chinatown,"  and 
the  hill  it  sits  on  stands  knee-deep  in 
that  undesirable  and  despised  purlieu, 
which  offers  the  only  access.  When 
you  get  out  there,  and  have  ceased 
wondering  at  the  jig-saw  antics  of  the 
days  of  the  old  ' '  magnates, "  "  when  the 
miners  were  the  kings,"  you  find  as 
interesting  a  residential  quarter,  of  as 
beautiful  houses  without  and  —  if  I  may 
generalize  from  the  gracious  hospitality 
of  the  only  one  it  was  vouchsafed  me  to 
enter  —  within,  as  you  will  find  in  any 
American  or  foreign  city,  and  with  the 
same  grateful  air  that  the  houses  of 
Pasadena  had  of  not  being  "palaces," 
but  only  happy  and  comfortable  homes, 
trophies,  once  more,  of  "Triumphant 
Democracy." 


Day   Seventh 
OVER   THE   RANGE 

There  is  nothing  to  see  from  the 
Oakland  ferryboat  at  6  o'clock  P.M. 
in  late  December  excepting  the  reced- 
ing twinkles  of  the  lights  of  Cosmopolis 
and  the  ferryboat  itself,  which,  by  dint 
of  taking  forty  minutes  to  its  transit,  is 
a  floating  barber's  shop  and  restaurant 
as  well  as  conveyance.  The  Sacra- 
mento Valley  and  its  stations  are  like- 
wise mere  names  called  out  in  the  dark. 
But  this  morning,  Holy  Good  Luck 
once  more!  For  I  awake  precisely  at 
the  psychological  moment  and  twitch 
my  curtain  blue  to  become  aware,  in 
the  gray  dawning,  of  snow  and  pine 
trees  outside,  and  to  raise  the  curtain 


<S>ut  West 


entirely  on  the  new  scene.  The  sky 
brightens  from  gray  to  luminous  pale 
amber,  not  bright  enough  yet  to  extin- 
guish a  pale  fading  star  or  two,  the 
dark  green  of  the  pines  grows  starker, 
and  the  great  carpet  whiter.  We  have 
passed  the  summit  and  are  unmistak- 
ably sliding  down  hill.  The  sudden 
consciousness  that  this  is  sunrise  on  the 
Sierra  Nevada  we  are  witnessing  dis- 
sipates the  last  remains  of  drowsiness. 
And  presently  we  whisk  into  the  dark 
of  a  tunnel,  with  rapid  slits  of  light  in 
its  timber  frame,  and  no  sooner  out  of 
that  than  we  plunge  into  another.  A 
line  of  Kipling  has  been  running  in  my 
head  all  these  days,  the  line  that  tells 
how  "the  many-shedded  levels  loop 
and  twine,"  and  I  have  been  awaiting 
the  verification.  The  snowsheds  of 
the  plains  have  been  long  since  aban- 


©per  tbe  IRanae  103 

doned  in  favor  of  the  wind  breaks  and 
snow  breaks  of  Wyoming  I  have  al- 
ready told  of.  The  verification  is  com- 
plete at  last.  The  whole  stanza  is 
worth  quoting  for  the  vividness  with 
which  it  paints  this  scene : 

Through  the  gorge  that  gives  the  stars  at 

noonday  clear  — 
Up  the  pass  that  packs  the  scud  beneath 

our  wheel  — 
Round   the   bluff   that    sinks   her   thousand 

fathom  sheer  — 
Down  the  valley  with  our  guttering  brakes 

asqueal  : 
Where  the  trestle  groans  and  quivers  in  the 

snow, 
Where  the  many-shedded  levels  loop  and 

twine, 
So  I  lead  my  reckless  children  from  below 

Till  we  sing  the  song  of  Roland  to  the  pine. 
With  my  "  Tinka-tinka-tinka-tink ! " 

(And  the    ax   has   cleared  the  mountain, 

croup  and  crest.) 

So  we  ride  the  iron  stallions  down  to  drink, 
Through  the  canyons  to  the  waters  of  the 
West. 


104  ©ut  West 


There  is  the  crossing  of  the  Sierra 
done  once  and  for  all.  "Hurrah!" 
I  remember  Clarence  King  exclaim- 
ing in  his  joy  when  he  fell  in  with  that 
stanza  for  the  first  time,  Clarence 
King,  the  best  of  all  judges  by  his 
knowledge  of  the  range  which  he 
crossed  and  explored  years  before  the 
railroad,  and  by  his  poetical  sensibility 
also  —  and  ever  after  maintained  that 
"The  Song  of  the  Banjo  "  was  Kipling's 
high-water  mark  in  verse. 

It  is  a  different  world  on  the  hither 
side  of  the  mountains,  with  its  somber 
pine  forest,  its  scarps  and  gulches,  its 
increasing  signs  everywhere  of  dis- 
figuring mining,  quarrying,  boring  in- 
dustries, its  Yankeeism  for  the  Spanish 
of  the  further  slope,  the  sweet  do  noth- 
ing supplanted  by  the  ugly  do  much. 


©vet  tbe  IRange  105 

The  change  is  denoted  by  the  disappear- 
ance of  the  sonorous  Spanish  names  of 
the  stations  of  the  coast  line,  even  the 
Benicia  and  Sacramento  of  the  western 
slope  displaced  by  Colfax  and  Gold 
Run  and  Dutch  Flat  and  Truckee. 
For  all  that,  the  scene  is  full  of  interest 
until  we  reach  the  bottom,  the  high 
plateau  of  Nevada.  But  after  five 
miles  of  this,  with  its  monotonous  sage 
brush  bounded  by  low-lying  mountains 
afar  off,  one  finds,  absolutely  for  the 
first  time  since  leaving  Omaha,  that  he 
can  afford  to  betake  himself  to  a  book 
by  daylight,  and  is  not  compelled  to 
keep  looking  out  of  the  window  for 
fear  of  losing  something. 

Almost  the  only  incident  I  recall  of 
this  daylong  journey  over  the  arid 
plain  is  that  of  the  accursed  newsboy 


io6  ©ut  West 


of  Reno,  whom,  being  pressed  for  time, 
I  engaged  to  buy  me  a  quarter's 
worth  of  souvenir  postcards  at  the 
neighboring  store,  and  who  returned 
with  four,  the  souvenir  card  through- 
out the  West  being  a  staple  article  at 
two  for  a  nickel  or  twelve  for  a  quarter. 
A  nimble  and  promising  thief  that 
newsboy,  whether  destined  for  the 
Senate  or  the  halter.  Rather  sadly  fell 
our  Christmas  Eve,  in  spite  of  the  cheer- 
fulness and  the  abundant  and  strange 
ancedotage  of  the  genial  'Friscan  friend 
I  picked  up.  The  dullness  was  light- 
ened an  hour  after  dark  by  the  irrup- 
tion into  the  smoking  apartment  of  the 
Pullman  we  two  had  had  mainly  to 
ourselves,  of  a  lank  stripling  in  a  red 
flannel  shirt  and  cowhide  boots,  appar- 
ently a  cowboy  fresh  from  riding  the 
range,  who  produced  from  his  stores  a 


©v>er  tbe  IRange  107 

box  of  better  cigars  than  you  would 
expect  to  encounter  in  Nevada.  ' '  Very 
likely  some  magnate's  son,"  whispers 
my  'Friscan  friend.  "You  can't  go 
by  clothes  here."  Sure  enough,  it 
appears  casually  that  the  newcomer 
is  a  graduate  of  Leland  Stanford,  who 
knows  many  things  besides  sheep  rais- 
ing, which  he  evidently  knows  particu- 
larly, and  tells  us  that  there  are  a  mil- 
lion sheep  in  Nevada.  How  they  pick 
up  a  living  is  more  than  one  can  make 
out  from  what  is  to  be  seen  from  the 
railroad's  right  of  way,  which  still  com- 
mands a  broad  prospect. 


Day  Eighth 
THE   CITY   OF   THE   SAINTS 

And  once  again,  "San  Buena  Ven- 
tura"! As  yesterday,  I  am  awakened 
just  at  the  psychological  moment, 
awakened,  this  time,  by  a  feeling  that 
the  chugging  beneath  the  car  is  not 
the  smooth,  continuous  glide  to  which 
by  this  time  I  am  inured,  a  feeling  of  a 
different  substructure.  A  twitch  of 
the  curtain  assures  me  that  the  sur- 
rounding country  is  not  snow,  as  yes- 
terday, or  sand,  as  four  days  ago,  nor 
any  variety  of  terra  firma,  but  ripples 
of  water.  We  are  on  a  bridge.  The 
complete  arousal  which  follows  this 
discovery  brings  with  it  a  sense  that  we 
must  be  at  last  on  the  great  "Lucin 

108 


ttbe  Cits  of  tbe  Saints       109 

Cut-off, ' '  which  modern  railroading 
has  erected  on  trestles  across  the  shal- 
lower parts  of  the  Great  Salt  Lake,  to 
save  certain  forty-odd  miles  of  distance, 
certain  difficult  grades,  certain  racking 
curves.  "I  am  not  here"  to  give  you 
the  statistics  of  these  economies.  Mr. 
Oscar  K.  Davis  has  given  them  com- 
pletely in  the  January  Century,  to 
which  I  beg  to  refer  importunate  in- 
quirers. From  his  most  interesting 
and  exhaustive  article  you  will  learn 
how  it  pays  a  great  railroad  to  grapple 
with  bristling  engineering  problems, 
and  to  expend  a  bagatelle  of  four  mil- 
lions or  so  in  such  an  improvement  in 
order  to  reduce  operating  expenses  of 
which  each  singly  and  daily  is  a  trifle, 
but  of  which  the  accumulation,  in 
time  and  space,  is  enormous.  Mr. 
Davis's  summary  is  worth  repeating: 


©ut  iciest 


"Forty-three  miles  in  distance  are 
lopped  off,  heart  breaking  grades 
avoided,  curves  eliminated,  hours  of 
time  in  transit  saved,  and  untold 
worry  and  vexation  prevented,  at  the 
same  time  that  expenses  of  operation 
are  reduced  more  than  enough  to  pay 
interest  on  the  whole  cost  twice  over." 
When  you  have  taken  in  the  figures 
you  will  be  in  the  way  of  realizing  that 
even  the  vast  design  of  tunneling  the 
Sierra  Nevada  and  doing  away  with 
our  sunrise  of  yesterday  is  not  an  iri- 
descent dream  of  the  designer,  but  an 
urgent  problem  of  practical  railroading. 

Meanwhile  the  picturesque  tourist 
who  is  here  to  receive  with  thankful- 
ness what  impressions  may  befall  him 
cannot  be  too  thankful  for  the  good 
luck  which  no  contract  could  have 


ZTbe  Gits  of  tbe  Saints 


guaranteed  him.  He  finds  himself, 
so  far  as  sensations  and  perceptions  go, 
from  this  side  of  the  car  or  from  the 
other,  on  a  railroad  out  in  the  middle 
of  the  ocean: 

nee  jam  amplius  ullae 

Apparent  terrae,  coelum  undique  et  undique 
pontus. 

Nothing  in  the  gray  dawn  visible  but 
sea  and  sky,  as  is  no  wonder  with  the 
greatest,  excepting  the  Great  Lakes, 
of  all  our  inland  waters.  But  now,  off 
to  the  southeast,  if  indeed  we  head  due 
eastward,  the  gray  murk,  low  down  on 
the  horizon,  becomes  faintly  em- 
purpled, while  above  it  the  still  unrisen 
sun  inflames  two  broad  horizontal  belts 
of  cloud  to  gold,  heightens  the  pallid 
sky  above  them  to  palpitating  green, 
and,  still  above,  kindles  to  flaming 


©ut 


scarlet  a  great  fleece  of  morning  mist. 
We  see  great  sunsets  from  the  Times 
tower.  (I  do  not  know  so  much  about 
the  sunrises  from  that  point  of  view.) 
At  Salt  Lake,  as  I  am  presently  to  hear, 
they  pride  themselves  on  both  sunrises 
and  sunsets,  holding,  it  seems,  that  the 
saline  particles  rising  from  a  lake  some 
ten  times  as  salt  as  the  Atlantic  refract 
to  peculiar  beauty  the  level  solar  rays. 
However  that  may  be,  this  Christmas 
sunrise  over  the  lake  is  a  picture  to 
hang  with  the  sunrise  of  yesterday 
over  the  Sierra  in  the  gallery  of  memory 
so  long  as  memory  lasts. 

It  is  rather  startling,  in  alighting  at 
the  City  of  the  Saints,  to  find  the  first 
building  after  leaving  the  station  and 
the  rather  shabby  hotel  which  con- 
fronts it,  emblazoned  in  large  gilt 


tTbe  Cits  of  tbe  Saints 


letters  "Keeley  Institute."  One  can- 
not say  the  institute  is  superfluous,  for, 
even  on  Christmas  Day,  one  finds  pro- 
vision for  both  the  bibulous  and  the 
aleatory  instincts  of  our  nature  appar- 
ently adequate  to  any  possible  demand. 
"There,"  explained  my  most  kindly 
local  guide,  philosopher,  and  friend, 
"in  that  saloon,"  indicating  one  of  no 
exceptional  exterior  splendor,  '  '  you  will 
meet  every  millionaire  in  Utah,  if  you 
wait  long  enough.  Some  of  'em  won't 
drink  anywhere  else."  As  to  the  alea- 
toriness,  I  was  to  witness  that  it  is  the 
custom  of  the  leading  citizens  of  Salt 
Lake  to  toy  with  contrivances  of  cards 
or  dice,  in  competition  with  the  dealer, 
to  determine  whether,  when  they 
wanted  two  cigars,  they  should  pay 
for  four  or  for  none.  As  for  "Mining 
Stocks  for  Sale"  in  the  window  of  a 


H4  ©ut  West 


saloon,  I  had  been  familiarized  with 
that  phenomenon  in  Ogden.  The 
sanctimony  of  the  Latter  Day  Saints 
looks  peculiar. 

Through  this  rapid  record  I  have 
confined  myself  to  impressions  and 
forborne  to  go  into  "questions."  But, 
here  in  Salt  Lake  City,  the  Mormon 
question  is  of  the  essence.  It  is  in  the 
air.  I  asked  my  aforementioned  local 
authority  whether  the  line  of  political 
cleavage  was  a  line  also  of  social 
demarkation,  whether,  for  instance,  a 
Mormon  was  "clubbable"  from  the 
Gentile  point  of  view.  "Bless  your 
innocence!"  was  his  answer,  "half  the 
friends  I  shall  introduce  you  to,  walk- 
ing up  the  street,  will  probably  be 
Mormons."  Another  Gentile  said: 
"Politically  we  are  down  on  them,  and 


Gits  of  tbe  Saints       us 


will  beat  them  every  time  we  can. 
They  owe  a  higher  allegiance  than  that 
to  Uncle  Sam,  and  we  won't  have  it. 
But  socially  they  are  just  like  anybody 
else.  We  dance  with  the  girls  and 
drink  with  the  men."  The  Gentiles 
have,  in  fact,  won  a  great  municipal 
victory  just  now  here  in  Salt  Lake. 
It  is  hard  for  the  stranger  to  make  out 
how  a  people  so  peculiar  should  not  be 
more  peculiar. 

"Temple  Square"  is  the  only  archi- 
tectural peculiarity  of  the  place,  for 
the  monument  to  "Brigham  Young 
and  the  Pioneers,"  though  one  might 
wish  it  were  a  better  monument,  is  by 
the  testimony  of  candid  Gentiles  de- 
served, and  the  Eagle  Gate  has  its 
ample  excuses,  from  the  point  of  view 
of  its  projectors.  There  would  be  a 


<s>ut  West 


better  Pioneers'  Monument  now,  not 
that  this  is  a  bad  one  as  American 
monuments  go.  Mr.  Dallin,  the  Mor- 
mon sculptor,  of  whose  work  a  spirited 
equestrian  sketch  stands  in  the  pleasant 
and  hospitable  Commercial  Club,  is  of 
high  repute  with  his  artistic  brethren; 
and  in  the  same  repository  I  found 
several  canvases  by  a  painter  who  evi- 
dently knew  his  Paris,  and  whose  work 
was  not  more  redolent  of  his  native  soil 
than  that  of  the  other  usual  graduates 
of  that  capital.  The  notion  of  an  artis- 
tic Mormon  is  startling  to  the  stranger. 
Yet  in  fact  there  is  more  artistic  apti- 
tude among  the  Mormons  than  among 
their  Gentile  neighbors,  and  they  take 
to  music,  as  well  as  to  the  plastic  arts, 
with  readiness  and  success.  It  is  plea- 
sure and  justice  to  record  that  those 
Gentiles  who  do  not  inhabit  Utah, 


Cits  of  tbe  Saints 


and  who  have  only  business  dealings 
with  the  Mormon  leaders,  have  nothing 
but  good  to  say  of  them  as  men  of  ideas, 
as  men  of  affairs,  and  as  fair  dealers. 

Do  you  remember  Dickens's  testi- 
mony about  the  shipload  of  English 
Mormon  emigrants  he  went  to  look  at 
in  the  London  Docks  in  the  early  six- 
ties, prepared  to  curse,  and  found  him- 
self compelled  to  bless  altogether?  It 
is  worth  quoting  how,  watching  them 
under  the  circumstances  of  a  hasty 
embarkation  in  a  sailing  ship,  he  would 
have  taken  them  for  ''in  their  degree, 
the  pick  and  flower  of  England." 

"To  suppose  the  family  groups  of 
whom  the  majority  of  emigrants  were 
composed  polygamically  possessed, 
would  be  to  suppose  an  absurdity 
manifest  to  any  one  who  saw  the 
fathers  and  mothers.  .  .  I  went  on 


n8 


board  their  ship  to  bear  testimony 
against  them  if  they  deserved  it,  as  I 
fully  believed  they  would ;  to  my  great 
astonishment  they  did  not  deserve  it; 
and  my  predispositions  must  not  affect 
me  as  an  honest  witness." 

A  survey  of  Salt  Lake  from  Temple 
Square  to  Fort  Douglas  and  back  — 
Fort  Douglas,  which  has  been  an  over- 
hanging menace  to  the  town  almost 
since  the  expedition  of  Albert  Sidney 
Johnston,  in  the  days  of  Buchanan  — 
shows  only  a  very  attractive  and  invit- 
ing town,  with  wide  expanse  of  happy 
homes,  its  due  proportion  of  churches 
—  Catholic,  Congregational,  and  so 
forth  —  with  more  than  its  due  pro- 
portion, one  would  say,  of  schoolhouses. 
Looking  at  the  stately  schoolhouses 
and  the  Temple  one  is  inclined  to 


Cits  ot  tbe  Saints       119 


repeat  with  Victor  Hugo  about  the 
printed  book  and  Notre  Dame,  "ceci 
tuera  cela."  But  apparently  not  so. 
The  learning  of  the  Gentiles  is  avail- 
able to  the  Saints.  If  there  be  a 
Gentile  University  of  Utah,  so  also 
there  is  a  University  of  the  Saints  and  a 
"Brigham  Young  University"  thereto. 
If  there  be  an  able  and  pugnacious 
Salt  Lake  Tribune,  so  there  is  an  able 
and  pugnacious  Mormon  organ,  The 
Deseret  News,  of  which  I  obtained  a 
holiday  number,  weighing  a  pound  and 
a  half  and  including  a  hundred  pages, 
according  to  the  canons  of  "metro- 
politan" Sunday  journalism,  and  of 
which  I  should  not  speak  ill,  for  it  had 
much  information  of  use  to  me.  But 
one  cannot  help  feeling  that  Mormon- 
ism  is  doomed,  in  spite  of  all  the 
specious  showings  it  can  make  for  itself. 


©ut  "QClest 


A  peculiar  people  can  remain  peculiar 
only  by  detachment  and  isolation,  and 
must  merge  now  that  it  has  been  fairly 
caught  up  with.  It  is  a  lack  of  faith 
in  "Uncle  Sam"  to  seek  to  accelerate 
the  inevitable  catastrophe.  A  nation 
which  boasts  of  being  able  to  assimi- 
late so  many  hundreds  of  thousands  of 
polyglot  foreigners  a  year  would  show 
little  confidence  in  itself  if  it  did  not 
believe  that  it  could  assimilate  these 
few  hundreds  of  thousands  of  belated 
strangers  without  exterminating  or  per- 
secuting them,  and  should  trust  to 
violence  rather  than  to  time,  which 
works  more  surely: 


Even  as  that  Bull-god  once  did  stand 
And  watched  the  burial-clouds  of  sand, 
Till  these  at  last,  without  a  hand, 
Rose  o'er  his  eyes,  another  land, 
And  blinded  him  with  Destiny. 


BACK  EAST" 


"BACK  EAST" 

And  so  I  rejoin  in  the  Christmas 
dusk  my  companions  of  the  first  trip  of 
the  Los  Angeles  Limited,  having  for 
the  first  time  seen  my  country,  and 
being  now  engaged  in  the  attempt  to 
celebrate  it.  I  do  not  know  how  much 
the  eagle  may  have  been  heard  to 
screech  in  the  foregoing  pages.  I  only 
know  that  patriotic  pride  and  joy  have 
attended  the  voyager  and  increased 
with  every  step  of  his  progress.  It  is  a 
dozen  years  or  more  since  an  eminent 
editor  explaining  his  "run  across," 
said:  "Oh,  you  know,  Europe  is  a 
matter  now  of  $200  and  ten  days." 
True,  the  voyager  for  that  money  and 
in  that  time  can  cross  and,  on  an 

express  steamer,  even  recross,  having 
123 


124  JBacfe  JEast 

observed  the  scenery  of  the  North 
Atlantic  by  the  way.  It  is  exactly  ten 
days  from  Chicago  to  Chicago,  this  trip 
we  have  been  taking,  twelve  days  from 
New  York  to  New  York,  eight  days 
from  the  Missouri  to  the  Coast  and  back, 
as  we  have  gone  and  come.  "Ten 
days  and  $200"  from  Chicago,  twelve 
days  and  $250,  say,  from  New  York. 
Our  trip  was  possibly  too  strenuous  for 
some,  who  would  require  more  than 
three  nights  out  of  twelve  in  a  station- 
ary bed.  Allowances  can  be  made  by 
and  for  these  weaker  brethren  and 
sisters.  I  should  have  been  glad  of 
another  day  in  the  Garden,  and  of 
another  at  the  Golden  Gate,  which 
would  have  made  an  even  fortnight 
from  New  York.  But  in  what  direc- 
tion could  you  go,  within  these  limits 
of  time  and  money,  which  would  offer 


Bacfc  Bast  125 


so  much  of  delight  to  the  eyes,  of 
instruction  to  the  mind,  of  aliment  for 
patriotism  ?  For  this  last  in  the  retro- 
spect is  the  most  potent  of  considera- 
tions. It  used  to  be  the  fashion  for 
politicians  returning  from  Europe  to 
say  that  they  came  back  better  Ameri- 
cans than  they  went.  But  an  Ameri- 
can, whatever  part  he  inhabits,  cannot 
help  coming  back  from  travel  in  the 
other  parts  a  better  American  than  he 
went.  Even  poor  old  New  York  may 
have  its  patriotic  uses  for  a  Middle 
Westerner  himself.  To  see  three  thou- 
sand miles  of  Triumphant  Democracy, 
to  mingle  with  all  sorts  and  condi- 
tions of  men  and  not  to  find  one  who 
does  not  fervently  believe  in  the  United 
States  of  America  —  that  is  an  experi- 
ence which  must  be  undergone  to 
be  appreciated.  After  all  our  "little 


126  Bacfc  Bast 


fears,"  Liberty,  Equality,  Fraternity 
are  accomplished  facts  throughout  this 
land.  "I  met  a  hundred  men  on  the 
road  to  Delhi,  and  they  were  all  my 
brothers." 


"CONSIDERATIONS  BY  THE 
WAY." 


127 


"CONSIDERATIONS   BY   THE   WAY" 

"  The  side  lights  of  a  car  in  motion," 
according  to  Rufus  Choate,  whose  the 
phrase  is,  hardly  afford  a  safe  basis  for 
generalization.  And  yet  the  observer 
who  is  fresh  from  surveying  three 
thousand  miles  of  Triumphant  Democ- 
racy cannot  help  compiling  his  obser- 
vations into  some  sort  of  general 
conclusions.  The  mere  necessity  of 
arranging  them  in  order  compels  him  to 
so  much  of  generalization.  He  cannot 
help  asking  himself,  "What  does  all 
this  mean?"  After  painful  ponder- 
ing, it  seems  to  this  voyager  and  ob- 
server that  the  most  convenient  sum- 
mary of  all  these  impressions  is  the 
French  summing  up  of  the  principles 

which  the  French  thought  out  before 
129 


Considerations  b    tbe 


us,  although  we  applied  it  in  practice 
before  them.  "Uncle  Sam,"  accord- 
ing to  the  eloquent  speech  of  Gen. 
Patrick  Collins  at  one  of  the  Demo- 
cratic conventions  which  nominated 
Grover  Cleveland,  is  "the  child  of 
Revolution  nurtured  on  Philosophy." 
There  was  no  thought  of  French  phi- 
losophy in  the  minds  of  the  great 
majority  of  the  Continental  Congress 
in  Philadelphia.  Like  Edie  Ochiltree 
in  Scott's  novel,  they  were  '  '  nae  liberty- 
men,"  and  like  him  they  stood  upon 
"the  prerogative"  of  British  subjects. 
His  colleagues  of  his  committee  allowed 
the  bookish  young  Jefferson  to  under- 
pin their  Declaration  of  Independence 
with  what  philosophic  support  he  might 
have  derived  from  his  reading,  regard- 
ing his  glittering  generalities  as  pad- 
ding, and  being  themselves  intent  only 


Consecrations  bs  tbe 


upon  asserting  their  "prerogatives"  as 
British  yeomen  or  British  squires.  As 
their  friend  and  advocate  Burke  was 
to  put  it,  a  dozen  years  later,  they 
"claimed  their  franchises,  not  on  ab- 
stract principles,  as  the  'Rights  of 
Men'  but  as  the  rights  of  Englishmen, 
and  as  a  patrimony  derived  from  their 
forefathers."  That  they  were  found- 
ing a  new  nation  upon  the  principles  of 
the  "Contrat  Social"  would  have  been 
an  abhorrent  proposition  to  such  of 
them  as  had  ever  heard  of  Rousseau. 
The  motto  into  which  French  lucidity 
condensed  republican  aspirations  would 
assuredly  have  been  rejected  by  them. 
And  yet  one  is  forced  to  revert  to 
the  French  epigram,  and  to  say  that 
the  triumph  of  American  democracy 
is  a  triumph  of  "Liberty,  Equality, 
Fraternity." 


I.   LIBERTY. 

Liberty  is  plainly  enough  the  prime 
factor  in  this  great  success.  What 
Mr.  G.  W.  Steevens  said  of  the  aspect 
of  New  York  may  be  said,  with  equal 
accuracy,  of  the  aspect  of  the  whole 
continent:  "It  is  the  outward  expres- 
sion of  the  freest,  fiercest  individu- 
alism." Therein,  if  therein  alone,  it 
commends  itself  to  the  Briton  from 
whom,  surely,  we  derive  the  freedom 
and  the  ferocity  of  our  individualism. 
Refractory  and  reactionary  Britons 
there  be  who  would  object  to  it  on  that 
ground.  Thomas  Carlyle  might,  and 
logically  must,  have  objected  to  the 
Nebraska  farmer  tilling  his  soil  and 
planting  his  trees,  as  to  the  Nevada 
132 


133 


miner  prospecting  on  his  individual 
account,  on  the  ground  that  he  was 
"an  anarchical  object,"  there  being 
nobody  to  "boss"  him  or  to  throw 
stones  or  snap  blacksnakes  at  him 
while  he  broke  the  stubborn  glebe. 
The  only  settlement  which  could  prop- 
erly have  commended  itself  to  the 
sage  was  the  Mormon  migration.  That 
was  ordered  and  hierarchical  enough 
to  please  him.  In  sooth,  the  Mormon 
migration  was  a  great  success.  It  is 
questionable  whether  the  valley  of  the 
Great  Salt  Lake  would  have  been,  even 
now,  turned  into  the  land  flowing  with 
milk  and  honey  that  it  is,  but  for  the 
business  foresight  and  provident  energy 
of  the  Mormon  leader,  who  marshaled 
and  directed  the  migration,  not  merely 
nor  mainly  from  the  valley  of  the 
Mississippi,  which  had  already  become 


134    Considerations  b£  tbe 


untenable  for  the  followers  of  Joseph 
Smith,  but  from  all  those  parts  of 
Europe  in  which  converts  to  Mormon  - 
ism  and  colonists  for  the  Great  Salt 
Lake  were  to  be  gathered.  Nobody 
will  pretend,  in  behalf  of  Carlyle,  that 
he  made  a  specialty  of  candor.  But  it 
is  only  candid  to  recall  that,  recurring 
in  his  old  age  (according  to  Froude)  ,  to 
the  recipe  of  emigration  he  had  pre- 
scribed in  his  prime,  together  with  the 
recipe  of  education,  as  the  solvent  of 
the  "Condition  of  England  Question," 
he  had  the  candor  to  own  that  in  his 
own  lifetime  this  part  of  the  problem 
had  been  settled,  by  the  mere  action 
of  supply  and  demand,  better  than  it 
could  have  been  settled  by  the  em- 
bodied wisdom  of  the  governing  classes 
of  Europe.  On  the  other  hand,  it  is 
arguable  that  the  subordination  and 


135 


obedience  arising  from  religious  faith 
were  essential  to  the  settlement  of 
Utah,  when  it  was  a  thousand  miles 
removed  from  the  nearest  outpost  of 
civilization. 

But  at  any  rate  Utah  was  the  only 
exception.  Everywhere  else,  "The 
Winning  of  the  West"  has  been 
accomplished  by  the  free  and  fierce 
individualism  which  is,  as  we  say,  the 
Anglo-Saxon  birthright,  and  in  the 
triumphs  of  which  our  British  brother 
can  take  part,  since, ' '  excipiendis  excep- 
tis,"  they  are  his  triumphs  also.  The 
civilization  of  the  West,  I  repeat,  would 
have  been  a  great  blow  to  Carlyle  and 
his  specialty  of  "government"  and 
anti-Anarchism.  But  even  his  rock- 
ribbed  prejudices  in  favor  of  coercion 
and  supervision  would  have  been,  must 


i.36    Considerations  b£  tbe 


have  been,  unsettled  if  he  had  had  the 
opportunity  of  taking  this  transcon- 
tinental trip  which  we  have  been 
taking,  and  of  seeing  "what  hath  Man 
wrought"  when  Man  is  simply  emanci- 
pated and  turned  loose  to  follow  his 
own  sense  of  his  own  interest.  He 
would  have  been  forced  to  admit,  on 
the  prairies  of  Nebraska,  that  "der  big 
brass-hat  pizness  does  not  make  der 
trees  grow.  "  "  Laissez  f  aire  "  is  a  French 
phrase  but  a  British  belief.  "Every 
Man  in  His  Humor"  is  as  British  in 
phrasing  as  in  sentiment.  That  simply 
to  unlock  the  human  energies  is  the 
way  to  make  them  most  productive 
is  a  creed  virtually  confined  to  the  Eng- 
lish-speaking peoples.  The  triumphs 
of  its  practical  application  over  the 
width  of  the  American  continent  they 
can  all  equally  share.  What,  they 


Xibertp  137 


may  with  equal  confidence  inquire, 
what  would  the  very  ideal  of  a  benevo- 
lent despot  have  made  of  this  continent 
compared  with  what  has  been  made 
of  it  by  the  unfettered  and  individual 
action  of  the  members  of  our  great 
democracy  ? 


II.   EQUALITY. 

It  is  at  this  next  stage  of  the  applica- 
tion of  the  French  version  of  the  motto 
of  the  American  democracy  that  the 
two  branches  of  the  English-speaking 
race  ramify  and  part  company.  The 
most  appreciative  and  sympathetic 
observer  of  the  progress  of  "Liberty," 
in  the  sense  of  unhampered  individual- 
ism, is,  doubtless,  after  the  American 
himself,  the  Englishman,  or  the  English- 
speaking  man  of  colonial  or  "depen- 
dent" affiliations.  But,  when  one 
comes  to  attribute  political  and  social 
successes  to  the  working  of  the  princi- 
ple of  equality,  to  the  extent  of  the 
abolition  of  all  artificial  distinctions 
among  mankind,  the  Englishman, 
138 


Equality  139 


especially  the  "well  born"  and  "well 
bred"  Englishman,  is  almost  the  worst 
possible  judge  of  the  result.  His  very 
birth  and  breeding  retain  him  on  the 
other  side.  A  Frenchman  is  a  far  better 
as  being  a  far  more  open-minded  judge. 
And  in  this  sense  it  is  particularly  a 
pity  that  our  national  culture  should 
be  so  exclusively  British,  and  that,  up 
to  a  time  within  the  lifetime  of  men  not 
yet  old,  we  should  so  meekly  have  sub- 
mitted to  the  application  of  British 
social  standards  to  our  own  so  totally 
different  conditions.  ' '  Liberty, ' '  in  the 
sense  of  individualism,  the  Briton 
understands  as  well  as  we  do.  I  am 
not  prepared  to  maintain  that  he  does 
not  understand  it  even  better.  But 
Equality  and  Fraternity,  the  other 
two  elements  of  the  democratic  idea, 
he  does  not  understand  at  all,  and  dis- 


140    Consifceratfons  b£  tbe 


believes  in  them  with  a  conviction 
exceeding  even  his  incomprehension. 
And  yet,  this  great  success  of  ours  is 
as  much  a  trophy  of  Equality  and 
Fraternity  as  of  Liberty.  The  things 
are  really  inextricable  and  indistin- 
guishable. 

I  remember  talking  with  a  '  '  bright  '  ' 
Englishman  in  Paris,  in  1900,  an  Eng- 
lishman who  has  since  distinguished 
himself  in  literary  work,  and  by  the 
most  just  title,  and  casually  observing 
that  I  liked  the  French  people  because 
they  were  patriotic,  because  they  real- 
ized their  motto,  and  because  Liberty, 
Equality,  Fraternity  were  to  them 
something  more  than  mere  words.  I 
had  no  notion  of  provoking  antago- 
nism or  controversy.  But  my  English- 
man took  me  up  short,  and  told  me  a 


Equality 


story,  by  way  of  disproving  my  allega- 
tion of  the  French  allegiance  to  equal- 
ity, importing  that  some  French  actress, 
let  us  say,  had  been  received  by  an 
English  Duke,  whom  some  French 
"Due"  had  markedly  declined  to  re- 
ceive. This  as  an  instance  that  British 
"society"  was  really  more  democratic 
than  French.  The  fact  so  clearly  was 
that  a  British  Duke  could  do  with 
impunity  whatever  he  chose  to  do, 
and  that  a  French  Due  could  not, 
that  for  the  moment  it  paralyzed  my 
powers  of  repartee.  A  hundred  years 
hence,  or  less,  the  British  peer  may  be 
deprived  of  his  legislative  powers.  But, 
even  so,  one  foresees  that  his  tremen- 
dous and  baleful  social  influence  is 
likely  to  remain  what  it  is  now.  It 
is  imbedded,  with  the  aid  of  the  cate- 
chism, in  the  British  Constitution.  The 


142    Gonstfterations  b£  tbe 


French  "aristocracy"  is  of  no  more 
practical  avail  than  the  American 
"Four  Hundred."  It  is  an  institution 
which  imposes  only  upon  the  willing, 
and  has  no  relation  to  the  general  life 
of  the  nation.  That  any  intelligent 
man  —  and  my  friend  was  highly  in- 
telligent —  should  compare  this  melan- 
choly survival,  disestablished  for  a 
hundred  years  —  since  surely  Louis 
Napoleon's  pinchbeck  titles  do  not 
count  —  not  only  legally  and  politi- 
cally, but  also  socially,  with  the  Brit- 
ish aristocracy,  that  huge  blight  and 
handicap  of  the  British  Empire  in  the 
modern  international  competition,  this 
was,  in  sooth,  a  revelation. 

It  was,  and  one  may  say  it  had  to  be, 
an  Englishman  who  took  up  his  parable 
against  the  democratic  idea,  as  em- 


Equality  143 


bodied  in  the  French  formula.  It  is  a 
full  generation  ago  that  Fitz  James 
Stephens,  afterward  Mr.  Justice  Stephen 
and  Sir  James  Fitz  James,  entered  his 
protest  against  the  way  the  world  was 
going,  in  a  book  expressly  entitled 
"Liberty,  Equality,  Fraternity,"  all 
three,  even  the  first,  being  thus  marked 
for  animadversion.  Even  "Liberty" 
which  a  Briton  is  born  to  appreciate, 
came  in,  at  least  Liberty  in  John  Stuart 
Mill's  appreciation  of  the  term,  as 
perhaps  it  had  to.  A  very  able  and 
vigorous  "kick"  the  book  was,  as  all 
its  readers  know,  even  though  it  be  far 
more  evident  now  than  it  was  then  that 
it  was  a  kick  against  the  pricks,  an 
expression  of  discontent  with  the  way 
the  world  was  inevitably  going.  It 
was  not  more  emphatic  than  explicit. 
Its  object,  according  to  its  author,  was 


144    Consffceratfons  b£  tbe 


"to  examine  the  doctrines  which  are 
rather  hinted  at  than  expressed  by  the 
phrase."  And  his  thesis  was  that 
"when  used  collectively,  the  words  do 
not  typify,  however  vaguely,  any  state 
of  society  which  a  reasonable  man 
ought  to  regard  with  enthusiasm  or 
self-devotion."  The  great  achieve- 
ment of  our  own  democracy,  that 
which  we  have  been  witnessing  in  the 
conversion  of  the  great  wilderness, 
"wherewith  the  mower  filleth  not  his 
hand,  neither  he  that  bindeth  up  the 
sheaves  his  bosom,"  within  a  human 
lifetime,  into  countless  human  homes, 
while  attributing  it  correctly  to  "the 
enormous  development  of  equality  in 
America,"  he  describes,  in  passing,  as 
"  the  rapid  production  of  an  immense 
multitude  of  commonplace,  self-satis- 
fied, and  essentially  slight  people." 


Equality 


American  democracy  had  by  no  means 
had  its  perfect  work  in  1870.  It  has 
done  enough  and  gone  far  enough 
since  to  make  it  certain  that,  while 
there  may  be  Englishmen  who  still 
hold  the  view  of  it  thus  expressed  then, 
no  responsible  Englishman  capable  of 
expressing  it  would  now  venture  to 
express  it.  Poor,  able,  pugnacious, 
insular,  British  James  Fitz  James! 
His  life  should  have  been  prolonged 
till  he  could  have  beheld  this  day  and 
taken  this  transcontinental  trip  with 
us. 

It  does,  in  truth,  require  a  miracle 
of  imaginative  sympathy  to  enable  a 
well-placed  Englishman  to  understand 
what  is  doing  on  this  continent.  Sir 
James  Fitz  James  probably  did  not 
pride  himself  upon  his  open-minded- 


146    Considerations  bp  tbe 


ness,  and  he  had  never  visited  this 
country.  Matthew  Arnold  did,  and 
had.  Moreover,  before  he  came  he 
had  combated,  as  one  of  the  results, 
perhaps,  of  his  sympathetic  study  of 
the  great  French  nation,  the  British 
notion  of  a  permanent  and  fixed  in- 
equality as  one  of  the  constituent 
elements  of  a  great  state.  Answering 
the  contention  of  one  Sir  William  Moles- 
worth,  apparently  adopted  by  Mr. 
Gladstone,  that,  with  the  English 
people  at  large,  "the  love  of  aristoc- 
racy," in  other  words,  the  love  of  in- 
equality, was  "a  religion,"  he  took  a 
text,  '  '  Choose  Equality  '  '  from  Menan- 
der,  and  meandered  about  it,  in  his 
delightful  way,  through  a  lecture  "de- 
livered at  the  Royal  Institution"  to 
insinuate  that  Mr.  Gladstone  and  Sir 
William  Molesworth,  in  planting  them- 


Equality  147 


selves  upon  the  Catechism  of  the  Church 
of  England,  were  not  altogether  secure 
of  "the  approval  of  time  and  of  the 
world."  It  was  Mr.  Gladstone,  by  the 
way,  who,  before  some  parliamentary 
committee,  when  he  was  Prime  Minister 
of  England,  being  asked  whether  he  was 
not  an  intimate  friend  of  some  Duke, 
say  of  Newcastle,  necessarily  his  intel- 
lectual and  political  inferior,  made 
humble  answer :  ' '  His  Grace  and  myself 
are  as  intimate  as  the  differences  in  our 
stations  will  allow,"  a  catechismal 
reply  involving  a  mental  attitude  abso- 
lutely inconceivable  to  an  American. 
Matthew  Arnold  not  only,  with  Men- 
ander,  "chose  equality,"  but  indicated 
a  distinct  apprehension  that  equality 
was  a  good  thing,  would  be  a  good 
thing  even  for  the  England  with 
which  he  invariably  and  perhaps 


4s    Consfoeratfons  bs  tbe 


necessarily  dealt  as  an  aggregation  of 
"classes,"  which  is  to  say  of  castes. 
He  showed  more  than  an  artistic  appre- 
ciation of  Wordsworth's  line 

Of  Joy  in  widest  commonalty  spread. 

He  showed  a  human  exultation  in  the 
thought.  And  yet,  when  he  came  to 
visit  the  favored  land  in  which  Joy  is 
in  fact  in  widest  commonalty  spread, 
he  found  that  he  did  not  like  it,  and 
he  frankly  avowed  that  his  dislike  was 
founded  precisely  upon  its  lack  of 
"distinction"  and  its  want  of  suitable 
and  special  provision  for  the  class  of 
'  '  gentlemen.  '  '  Therein  he  showed  him- 
self less  appreciative  of  the  American 
idea,  and  to  that  extent  less  of  a  philoso- 
pher than  a  British  tourist  of  the  pre- 
ceding generation,  Anthony  Trollope, 
to  wit,  who,  being  Britannically  re- 


Equality  149 


volted  by  the  airs  of  equality  taken 
by  his  Bostonian  hackman,  was  yet 
candid  enough  to  own  that  the  hack- 
man  might  be  a  better  citizen  precisely 
for  being,  from  the  Britannic  point  of 
view,  a  worse  hackman.  It  is  at  least 
worth  noting  that  Mr.  Arnold  did  not 
reprint  the  paper  in  which  his  com- 
plaint appeared.  One  hopes  the  omis- 
sion may  have  been  due  to  a  percep- 
tion that  his  complaint  was  that  nobody 
was  abased  that  he  might  he  exalted, 
that  he  was  ashamed  to  complain  that 
the  Comfort  of  the  units  was  sacrificed 
to  the  happiness  of  the  millions,  and 
that  he  recalled  the  injunction  of  his 
poetical  master1 

Never  to  blend  our  pleasure  or  our  pride 
With  sorrow  of  the  meanest  thing  that  feels. 

Such  instances  go  to  show  the  negli- 
gibility, from  the  American  point  of 


150    Considerations  ftp  tbe 


view,  of  British  criticisms  of  American 
"institutions,"  especially  of  the  Ameri- 
can institution  of  equality.  The  Brit- 
ish tourist  simply  cannot  help  miss- 
ing in  America  the  conveniences,  the 
diminution  of  social  friction  by  social 
lubrication,  which  he  enjoys  at  home. 
One  may  question,  indeed,  whether  he 
has  a  right  as  a  human  being  to  enjoy 
what  he  does  as  a  member  of  the  Brit- 
ish "upper  classes."  It  is  a  quarter  of 
a  century  since  I  was  nauseated  by  the 
obsequiousness  and  servility  of  the 
guide  who  forced  himself,  very  civilly, 
upon  me  at  Oxford,  thumbing  once 
more  a  hat  brim  already  overthumbed. 
He  was  an  educated  man,  a  man  of  my 
race  and  speech,  even  though  alcohol- 
ically  degraded  from  his  rightful  place 
among  men  "a  classical  scholar  and 
gentleman  "  after  the  pattern  of  Tufton 


Equality  151 


Hunt,  in  Thackeray's  "Philip:"  possi- 
bly also  a  clergyman,  though,  like  the 
Rev.  Tufton,  he  "sank  that."  And 
he  whiningly  quarreled  with  the  amount 
of  my  gratuity,  and  made  me  do  his 
blushing  for  him  and  for  the  dignity  of 
human  nature.  I  am  afraid  that  the 
well-placed  Briton  would  not  have 
shared  my  blushes.  At  any  rate  the 
well-placed  Briton  would  have  reserved 
his  blushes  for  the  social  degradation 
of  the  man  who  had  dropped  several 
rungs  down  "this  whole  ladder  of  de- 
pendence," which  according  to  a  Brit- 
ish classic,  Henry  Fielding,  constitutes 
the  British  social  system,  and  would 
not  have  found  it  requisite  to  blush  for 
the  merely  human  abjection  of  the 
servility.  But  it  is  easy  to  under- 
stand that  the  well-placed  Briton  does 
ont  enjoy  going  about  in  America. 


152    Consifcerations  b#  tbe 


"Money,"  says  Mr.  Kipling,  "cannot 
buy  service  in  America."  No,  thank 
God!  Not  that  kind. 

And  yet  it  is  at  this  point,  at  the 
increase  or  diminution  of  social  friction 
in  connection  with  personal  service, 
that  the  American  system  shows  to  the 
least  advantage  in  comparison  with  the 
European  system.  We  need  not  make 
too  much  of  Mr.  Arnold's  avowal  that 
he  was  made  more  comfortable  in 
traveling  on  the  other  side  than  on 
this  side  in  order  to  admit  that  "they 
order  these  matters  better"  abroad. 
In  fact  every  American  who  has  been 
in  Europe  knows  it.  Who  is  to  do  the 
work,  especially  what  we  call  the 
"menial"  work,  which  is  supposed  to 
degrade  the  performer,  and  which  is 
compensated  by  "tips,"  the  tip  being 


Equality  153 


by  hypothesis  a  "quantum  meruit," 
fixed  by  the  beneficiary,  for  personal 
service  for  which  no  fixed  charge  exists  ? 
What  becomes  of  "equality"  between 
the  tipper  and  the  tippee?  It  is  all 
very  well  for  Count  Tolstoy,  in  his 
character  as  Christian  Socialist  under 
Russian  conditions,  to  maintain  that 
everybody  ought  to  do  for  himself 
those  offices  which  are  recognized  as 
"menial,"  which  is  to  say,  degrading. 
The  rest  of  us  have  something  more 
pressing  to  do  than  to  carry  out  our 
social  theories  to  this  point  of  rigor. 
Very  well,  too,  for  Mr.  Hopkinson 
Smith,  on  the  eve  of  his  departure  for 
Europe  to  assume  the  character  of 
Tippoo  Sahib,  and  boldly  to  proclaim 
that  he  "loves  to  tip"  and  that  the  tip 
blesses  equally  him  that  gives  and  him 
or  her  who  takes.  But  neither  of  these 


Considerations  bp  tbe 


solutions  quite  reaches  the  American 
problem. 

A  solution  was  once  reached,  in 
San  Francisco,  about  a  generation  ago, 
as  was  recorded  by  an  ingenious  and 
ingenuous  British  tourist  of  that  time. 
"Me  man,"  he  represents  himself  as 
accosting  a  roustabout  on  the  wharf, 
"what  will  it  cost  me  to  have  this 
portmanteau  carried  to  the  hotel?" 
"Will  it  take  two  to  carry  it?"  "In- 
deed, no."  "Then  carry  it  yourself." 
It  must  have  been  a  particularly 
magnanimous  British  tourist  who  re- 
cords this  homage  to  the  spirit  of 
equality.  It  is  no  wonder  that  the 
commoner  sort  of  British  tourist  re- 
pines to  find  that  service  cannot  be 
had  for  money.  Arnold  himself,  in 
whom,  according  to  Mr.  Watson, 


Equality  155 


Something  of  worldling  mingled  still 
With  bard  and  sage, 

might  have  been  excused  for  missing 
the  ready  British  obsequiousness  excit- 
able by  threepence.  At  the  gates  of 
the  New  Jerusalem  itself  he  might  have 
resented,  in  his  character  of  British 
visitor  of  the  upper  class,  the  non- 
appearance  of  a  British  sub-angel  of 
the  lower  class,  doing  his  catechismal 
duty  in  that  state  of  eternity  to  which 
it  had  pleased  Providence  to  call  him, 
with  the  front  brim  of  his  modest 
aureole  already  dingy  with  much 
thumbing,  still  ordering  himself  lowly 
and  reverently  to  all  his  betters,  and 
waiting  to  bear  a  hand  with  the  lug- 
gage. What,  in  fact,  would  heaven 
be  to  a  British  visitor  of  the  select 
upper  class  without  at  the  very  least, 
a  "private  sitting  room"?  It  remains 


Considerations  b$  tbe 


true  that  you  do  not  compensate  your 
equal  by  means  of  tips,  and  that  tip- 
ping is  a  derogation  of  democracy. 
One  American  white  man  does  not 
receive  gratuities  from  another  Ameri- 
can white  man.  To  this  effect  that 
lovely  tale  of  Maurice  Kingsley's  about 
the  Caucasian  conductor  of  the  Pull- 
man car,  somewhat  sophisticated  and 
corrupted  out  of  his  birthright  by  the 
messes  of  pottage  his  passengers  had 
been  "lowering  his  moral  tone"  withal, 
and  who  had  been  particularly  polite  to 
a  lady  traveling  with  her  two  children 
all  the  way  from  Omaha  to  Ogden. 
This  in  the  old  days,  when  cars  were 
changed  at  Ogden,  at  which  point  he 
debarked  the  party  and  the  packages 
on  the  platform,  explained  to  the  lady 
where  and  when  her  train  might  be 
expected,  and  then  stood  with  supine 


Equality  157 


and  expectant  palm.  "Instead  of 
which"  the  better  American  ungloved 
her  own  and  extended  it  with,  "I  don't 
know  what  we  should  have  done,  sir, 
but  for  all  your  kindness."  Whereto, 
he,  at  once  abashed  and  exalted,  "By 
,  Madam,  you  do  me  proud." 

Ef  I  don't  make  his  meanin'  clear,  perhaps  in 
some  respex  I  can, 

I  know  that  "every  man"  don't  mean  a  nig- 
ger or  a  Mexican. 

In  fact,  our  practical  notions  of 
equality  include  only  the  white  Cauca- 
sian, native  to  this  soil,  or  thoroughly 
naturalized  upon  it.  It  takes  a  very 
tender  civic  conscience  indeed  to  under- 
go compunctions  about  tipping  a  Euro- 
pean waiter  in  a  restaurant  for  fear  of 
undermining  his  self-respect,  and  you 
are  quite  sure  that  your  forbearance 
in  that  respect  and  on  that  ground  will 


158    Considerations  fy?  tbe 


not  be  appreciated.  And  then,  which 
is  much  more  to  the  purpose  in  travel- 
ing, there  is  the  whole  Afro-American 
race.  I  wonder  if  any  evangelist  has 
gone  about  to  persuade  the  Afro- 
American  in  general  that  he  is  lower- 
ing the  dignity  of  his  manhood  and  his 
citizenship  by  taking  tips,  and  I  also 
wonder,  or  rather  I  do  not,  what  would 
become  of  that  evangelist  !  How  lucky 
that  one's  comfort  in  traveling  is  for 
the  most  part  confided  to  that  estima- 
ble race,  with  the  consciousness  on 
both  sides  that  at  the  journey's  end 
"there  are  certain  piacles."  As  to  the 
Pullman  porter,  his  ethnic  genius  for 
catching  his  sleep  in  snatches  keeps 
him  without  a  rival  in  that  field.  You 
may  grumble  at  the  high  degree  of  heat, 
at  night  particularly,  in  which  he 
luxuriates  and  you  suffer,  although  I 


Equality  159 


am  authoritatively  informed  that  this 
is  not  his  fault,  and  that  it  is  on  account 
of  the  Pullmanic  belief,  how  reached  I 
know  not,  that  75  Fahrenheit  is  a 
normal  sleeping  temperature  that  you 
find  it  maintained.  At  any  rale,  there 
is  something  highly  comforting  in  an 
obliging  "boy,"  whether  as  porter  or  as 
waiter,  if  your  social  conscience  be  not 
morbidly  tender  about  the  quid  pro 
quo.  My  esteemed  friend,  if  he  will 
allow  me  to  call  him  so,  Mr.  Ernest  V. 
Smith,  who  so  ably  and  genially  presides 
over  the  smoker  of  the  "Wolverine" 
between  New  York  and  Chicago,  in- 
forms me  that  there  is  an  "American 
Association  of  Railway  Employees," 
of  which  he  has  the  honor  to  be  presi- 
dent, confined  to  porters,  waiters,  and 
cooks,  in  other  words  to  employees  of 
color,  of  which  the  object  is  to  protect 


160    Considerations  b£  tbe  Wiay 

the  road's  passengers  by  vouching  for 
the  trustworthiness  of  its  members, 
and  which,  moreover,  offers  to  the 
Afro-American  employees  the  same  de- 
sirable advantages  that  are  offered  to 
the  Caucasian  employees  by  the  ' '  rail- 
road branches"  of  the  Young  Men's 
Christian  Association.  More  power  to 
the  elbow  of  the  American  Association 
of  Railway  Employees. 

It  remains  true  that  much  friction 
arises,  and  some  impugnment  of  the 
doctrine  of  equality,  when  you  are 
served  "menially"  by  a  man  of  your 
own  race  and  blood.  There  was  a  bell- 
boy at  the  Hotel  Angelus,  in  Los 
Angeles,  to  whom  I  confided  a  pair  of 
unmentionables  for  necessary  repairs, 
forgetting  that  there  was  a  pocket- 
book  in  one  of  the  pockets  thereof.  He 


Equality  161 


went  away  gaily  brandishing  the  article 
of  raiment  in  question,  only  to  return 
in  two  minutes  and  slap  the  pocket- 
book  down  before  me  with  the  remark, 
' '  Now,  I  hope  that  will  teach  you  not 
to  be  so  careless  another  time."  I  did 
not  resent  his  attitude,  however  odd  it 
was  for  a  tippee  in  expectation  to  take 
to  a  tipper  in  expectation.  But  I  did 
resent  the  Caucasian  crew  of  the  dining 
car  on  the  Southern  Pacific  next  day, 
who  indicated  their  equal  Americanism 
by  taking  superior  airs,  airs  mounting  to 
the  height  of  insolence,  and  did  what 
they  could  to  mar  the  pleasure  of  the 
trip.  Under  such  condition  a  tip  be- 
comes a  ' '  holdup. ' '  To  recur  to  Goethe : 
"When  a  man  shows  himself  a  boor 
to  show  himself  my  equal,  he  does  not 
show  himself  my  equal ;  he  only  shows 
himself  a  boor."  All  the  same  it  is  a 


162    Considerations  b£  tbe 


question  what  we  are  going  to  do  for 
"service"  compatibly  with  the  Ameri- 
can principle  of  equality,  when  the 
supply  of  Africa  and  Asia  and  un- 
naturalized  Europe  gives  out.  But 
the  question  cannot  yet  be  called  press- 
ing, 


III.    FRATERNITY. 

The  third  member  of  the  trinity  of 
the  French  epigram  is  as  essential  as 
either  of  the  other  two.  If  the  trinity 
were  not  indivisible  one  might  almost 
say  that  it  was  the  most  essential. 
"The  unity  of  the  community"  is  the 
excellent  jingling  motto  of  the  Chamber 
of  Commerce  of  Los  Angeles.  Nobody 
who  knows  the  amazing  things  that 
have  been  done  in  the  way  of  market- 
ing and  proclaiming  their  products 
throughout  the  world  by  the  fruit 
growers  of  Southern  California,  whose 
chief  organ  we  may  perhaps  take  this 
Chamber  of  Commerce  to  be,  will  be 
disposed  to  dispute  that  it  has  vindi- 
cated the  motto.  But  the  motto  is 
163 


164    Gonstoerations  bs  tbe 


extensible  even  to  a  "continental" 
signification.  The  "unity  of  the  com- 
munity," the  "solidarity  "  of  the  United 
States,  is  one  of  the  first  and  one  of 
the  last  impressions  you  derive  from 
a  transcontinental  trip.  Take,  to 
begin  with,  the  essential  matter  of 
language.  Evidently  you  cannot,  any- 
where else  on  the  planet,  go  three 
thousand  miles  straight  on  end  from 
home  and  find  everybody,  not  merely 
intelligible,  but  in  no  sense  strange,  in 
his  speech.  It  is  true  that  on  the 
Pacific  Coast  "  Betcherlife  "  takes  the 
place  of  the  corresponding  affirmative 
answer  to  a  casual  inquiry,  "Sure," 
and  with  no  more  consciousness  of 
jocosity  on  the  one  slope  than  on  the 
other.  Apart  from  this  locution  the 
New  Yorker  does  not  meet  anybody 
who  does  not  talk  not  only  his  language 


Jfraternits  165 


but  his  dialect.  Professor  Freeman  was 
not  what  you  may  call  a  wide-minded 
world  citizen.  His  cheerful  view  of 
our  own  future  was  sufficiently  dis- 
closed in  the  book  he  published,  or  at 
least  announced,  at  the  crisis  of  our 
Civil  War:  "A  History  of  Federal 
Government  from  the  Formation  of  the 
Achaian  League  to  the  Disruption  of 
the  United  States."  But  all  the  same, 
when  he  had  actually  visited  these 
shores,  or  perhaps  only  this  shore,  he 
had  the  candor  to  profess,  about 
"American  English,"  that  whereas  he 
had  never  heard  an  American  in 
America  speaking  English  which  he 
did  not  understand,  he  had  heard 
many  Englishmen  in  England  speak- 
ing English  which  he  did  not  under- 
stand. I  on  my  part  profess  that  there 
were  only  two  of  my  casual  interlocu- 


166    Considerations  b£  tbe 


tors  on  this  transcontinental  trip  who 
spoke  a  dialect  in  any  way  strange  to 
me.  One  was  a  railroad  man  from 
whose  lips  dropped  the  unmistakable, 
languorous,  and  delightful  intonation 
of  tide-water  Virginia  ;  the  other  a  news- 
paper man,  speaking  a  variant  of  the 
same,  and,  upon  question,  avowing 
himself  a  Kentuckian. 

Whence  is  it  that  we  derive  our  other 
most  pronounced  national  trait,  our 
undiscourageable  optimism?  Is  it  the 
product  of  our  "institutions,"  or  is  it 
merely  in  the  air  of  our  continent?  A 
comparison  of  ourselves  with  our  north- 
ern and  Canadian  neighbors  might 
help  to  determine  that  question.  But 
the  optimism  is  nevertheless  a  great 
fact.  Emerson  says,  "We  judge  a 
man's  wisdom  by  his  hope."  If  we 


dfraternitp  167 


likewise  judge  a  nation's  wisdom,  as- 
suredly we  are  the  wisest  of  nations. 
For  there  is  no  American,  in  all  this 
transcontinental  range,  who  has  not 
' '  his  eye  fixed  on  the  future ' '  and  with 
a  firm  belief.  Some  pages  back  I  was 
honestly  envying  Stevenson's  skill  as 
a  landscape  painter  in  words.  But  I 
should  not  choose  him  to  celebrate  my 
country.  He  has  frankly  told  why: 

To-morrow  for  the  States :  for  me 
England  and  Yesterday. 

What  truly  is  to  happen  when  the 
Land  without  a  Future  confronts  the 
Land  without  a  Past?  "Survives  Im- 
agination to  the  change  superior?" 
If  she  survives,  she  is  transmuted. 
"Imagination,"  in  our  West,  is  simply 
"the  substance  of  things  hoped  for, 
the  evidence  of  things  unseen;"  and  a 


168    Considerations  b£  tbe 


better  name  for  her  would  be  the 
Scriptural  name  of  "Faith."  In  this 
sense  the  American  people  are  the  most 
believing  people  in  the  world.  The 
natural  product  of  imagination  in  Eu- 
rope, with  its  storied  past,  may  very 
probably  be  the  historical  romance. 
The  natural  product  of  imagination 
in  our  America,  with  its  empty  past  and 
its  crowded  future,  may  be  an  honest 
"prospectus,"  if  you  can  imagine  such 
a  thing. 

I  have  already  quoted  that  "native 
proverb"  which  I  owe  to  Mr.  Kipling: 
'  '  I  met  a  hundred  men  on  the  road  to 
Delhi,  and  they  were  all  my  brothers." 
Allow  me  to  quote  it  again,  for  the  sake 
of  emphasizing  a  slight  but  possibly 
significant  exception  to  the  rule  of 
American  fraternity.  In  those  delight- 


169 


ful  "London  Films"  of  Mr.  Howells, 
which  the  judicious  and  fortunate 
among  us  have  all  been  reading,  he 
deprecates  the  desire  of  certain  among 
his  countrymen  in  England  of  being 
taken  nationally  rather  than  person- 
ally, for  the  exquisite  concluding 
reason,  "  I  do  not  like  all  the  Americans 
myself."  We  have  all  met  in  Europe 
this  kind  of  American  who  insists  upon 
being  taken  nationally,  but  have  met 
him,  I  suppose,  no  more  nor  oftener 
than  we  had  to.  But  the  Easterner 
in  the  Middle  West  finds  himself,  in 
spite  of  himself,  taken  sectionally  rather 
than  personally.  I  by  no  means  mean 
that  every  Middle  Westerner  he  meets 
takes  him  in  that  way,  I  only  mean 
that  everybody  he  meets  who  takes 
him  in  that  way  is  a  Middle  Westerner. 
It  may  never  have  occurred  to  a  New 


170    Gonsifcerations  b$  tbe 


Yorker,  so  long  as  he  stayed  at  home, 
to  frame  any  excuse  for  being  a  New 
Yorker,  there  were  so  many  to  keep 
him  company  in  that  calamitous  state. 
But  in  the  Middle  West  he  finds  that 
the  tag  to  his  introduction,  "of  New 
York,"  operates  as  a  scarlet  provoca- 
tive. He  is,  in  effect,  informed  that 
he  is  a  semi-foreigner,  and  that  it  is 
impossible  he  should  understand  what 
he  has  always  imagined  to  be  his  own 
country.  As  a  joke  this  is  possibly 
good,  though  it  scarcely  occurs  to  your 
Middle  Western  friend  that  after  a  few 
days  of  continual  intercourse  it  may 
be  capable  of  palling.  But  it  is  more 
than  a  joke.  It  is  often  a  fixed  idea. 
If  Mr.  Kipling's  "An  [N.  B.,  not 
"The"]  American"  exists  anywhere 
any  longer  it  must  be  in  the  Middle 
West. 


Blatant,  he  bids  the  world  bow  down, 
Or  cringing  begs  a  crumb  of  praise. 

"A  crumb  of  praise"  not  for  himself 
individually  nor  for  his  country,  but 
for  his  ''section."  My  experience  this 
trip  began  at  dinner  in  Chicago,  out- 
ward bound,  when  a  young  gentleman, 
challenged  by  the  suffix  "of  New 
York,"  kindly  gave  me  an  elementary 
lecture  across  the  table  on  the  basis 
and  meaning  of  American  institutions. 
The  Coaster,  I  repeat,  or  the  Intra- 
montane,  is  quite  free  from  this  pro- 
vinciality. He  takes  you  personally, 
or  he  takes  you  nationally,  as  his 
countryman.  But  your  existence  does 
not  make  each  particular  hair  of  him 
to  stand  on  end.  If  you  do  not  like 
his  things  you  are  kindly  welcome  to 
lump  them.  It  was  of  course  not  a 
Coaster,  it  was  necessarily  a  Middle 


172    Consecrations  bs  tbe 


Westerner,  who  asked  me,  in  the  hand- 
some rooms  of  the  Jonathan  Club  in 
Los  Angeles,  a  club,  as  so  many  more 
are  coming  to  be,  which  is  the  tenant  of 
a  floor  in  a  skyscraper:  "Well,  now, 
how  does  this  compare  with  clubs  in 
New  York?"  What  can  you  say  to  a 
sectionalist  like  that?  You  are 
tempted  to  reply,  in  the  words  of 
Private  Ortheris,  "  'Strewth  A  'mighty! 
I'm  a  man." 

The  Far  Easterner  very  gratefully 
misses  in  the  Far  West,  meaning  spe- 
cifically upon  the  Coast,  but  meaning 
also  the  intramontane  region,  this 
disposition  to  treat  him  as  an  outsider 
which  he  cannot  help  finding  in  the 
Middle  West.  It  is  true  that  two 
Coasters,  encountered  separately,  be- 
gan their  several  discourses  upon  the 


jfraternfts  173 


Chinese  question  with  an  identical 
preface:  "You  people  in  the  East 
don't  understand  this  question," 
before  developing  diametrically  oppo- 
site views  upon  it.  It  is  true  that  the 
Intramontane  may  tell  you,  as  one 
friendly  Intramontane  told  me,  that 
his  region  has  advantages  over  yours 
for  the  rearing  of  American  citizens, 
capable  of  coping  with  whatever  emer- 
gency may  arise.  "You  see,"  was  the 
way  this  Intramontane  put  it,  "a  man 
who  amounts  to  anything  between 
these  mountains  knows  everybody 
worth  knowing  in  six  or  seven  States. 
And,"  he  ecstatically  concluded,  "they 
all  call  him  Bill."  That  "East  or 
West,  hame's  best,"  is  a  pious  opinion 
which  anybody  is  free  to  hold  and  is 
very  likely  to  be  the  better  for  holding. 
The  sentiment  of  patriotism  is  doubt- 


174    Considerations  b£  tbe 


less  an  enlargement  merely  of  the 
domestic  affections.  But  if  they  do 
not  enlarge  they  do  not  become  patri- 
otism. The  "man  of  Boston  raisin'  ' 
was  the  target  of  hostile  suspicion  in  the 
mind  of  Dickens's  ''brown  forester," 
sixty  years  ago.  He  has  been  sup- 
planted in  that  capacity  by  the  New 
Yorker.  It  seems  that  the  same  super- 
sensitiveness  to  European  opinion 
which  existed  in  all  parts  of  the  country 
at  the  time  of  the  publication  of 
"Martin  Chuzzlewit"  and  "American 
Notes,"  and  even  more  at  the  time, 
ten  years  before,  of  the  publication  of 
Mrs.  Trollope's  "Domestic  Manners  of 
the  Americans,"  still  subsists  in  the 
Middle  West,  only  it  has  been  trans- 
ferred to  "Eastern"  opinion.  It  is 
true  that  Mrs.  Trollope's  book  was 
really  a  friendly  book,  recording  only 


175 


the  impressions  that  an  English  lady 
was  bound  to  form  of  the  Cincinnati 
of  1830,  and  that  Dickens  was  an 
avowed  caricaturist.  We  no  longer 
have  it  as  a  nation.  We  are  grown  up, 
nationally  speaking.  If  you  tell  a 
Londoner,  in  London,  that  you  do  not 
like  the  place,  he  not  only  does  not 
resent  your  dislike,  but  it  is  as  likely 
as  not  that  he  will  cheerfully  agree 
with  you:  "Ah,  yes.  Beastly  hole, 
isn't  it?  "  We  have  not  in  New  York 
quite  attained  that  wise  indifference 
of  the  wise  when  a  Londoner  does  not 
like  New  York,  and  expresses  himself 
with  insular  frankness  to  that  effect. 
But  we  flatter  ourselves  that  that  is 
because  we  individually  are  doing  the 
honors  of  our  country,  and  are  solicit- 
ous that  he  should  have  a  good  time  in 
our  country,  not  that  we  really  care 


176    Consffcerations  bp  tfoe  "May 

whether  he  likes  it  or  not.  Really  to 
care  would  be  provincial.  A  consider- 
ate writer  once  wrote  that  the  Ameri- 
can was  prepared  to  maintain  that  he 
was  nationally  better  than  an  English- 
man only  to  fend  off  the  assumption 
which  he  apprehended  that  he  was  not 
so  good.  "A  Certain  Condescension 
in  Foreigners,"  which  the  average 
American  may  have  apprehended,  be- 
fore we  became  the  signal  success  we 
are  now  all  conscious  of  being,  is  suc- 
ceeded in  the  Middle  West  by  the 
apprehension  of  a  like  condescension 
in  Easterners,  even  on  the  part  of  an 
Easterner  who  altogether  guiltless,  to  his 
own  consciousness,  of  having  any  other 
desire  respecting  his  Middle  Western 
brother  than,  in  the  words  of  the  old 
Masonic  rhyme,  to  meet  upon  the 
level,  and  to  part  upon  the  square. 


177 


It  is  perfectly  in  vain  that  the  baited 
Easterner,  who  does  not  in  the  least 
desire  to  be  known  as  an  Easterner, 
but  only  as  an  American,  struggles  to 
point  out  to  these  monopolists  and 
cornerers  of  Americanism  that  the 
typical  American  of  this  generation, 
the  man  who  is  equally  at  home  from 
Mount  Desert  to  San  Diego,  and  from 
Seattle  to  Key  West,  happens  also  to 
be  a  native  of  Manhattan  Island,  where 
he  was  born  and  bred,  like  his  ancestors 
to  the  third  and  fourth  generation. 
Everybody  knows  that  that  dreadful 
"  break  "  of  Mr.  Bryan's  ten  years  ago 
about  the  "enemy's  country"  would 
be  quite  out  of  the  question  for  Theo- 
dore Roosevelt,  as  for  any  other  all- 
American.  But  I  can  find  no  reason 
to  suppose  that  that  dreadful  remark 
jarred  at  all  upon  the  patriotic  sensi- 


178    Considerations  b£  tbe 


bilities  of  the  convinced  Middle  West- 
erner, the  Middle  Westerner  of  the 
fixed  sectional  idea,  or  that  he  regarded 
it  as  anything  but  a  commonplace  and 
casual  statement  of  fact.  And  yet 
this  same  restricted  American  it  is  who 
accuses  you,  you  of  the  Eastern  slope, 
especially  you  the  New  Yorker,  of  being 
'  '  provincial  '  '  and  '  '  un-American  .  '  ' 
Truly  enough,  as  Dean  Swift  puts  it, 
it  is  idle  to  expect  that  "reasoning  will 
make  a  man  correct  an  ill  opinion  which 
by  reasoning  he  never  acquired." 

I  am  afraid  that  it  is  our  esteemed 
Four  Hundred  that  have  brought  about 
this  thing.  The  Middle  Westerner  who 
comes  to  New  York  and  sees,  say, 
white  men  in  livery  and  dock-tailed 
horses,  is  apparently  disposed  to  hold 
every  New  Yorker  he  meets  responsible 


IfraternftE  179 


for  every  one  of  those  "un-American" 
additions  or  privations.  It  does  not 
matter  that  you  may  disapprove  of 
them  as  decidedly  as  he,  holding,  with 
the  good  Washington  Irving,  that  the 
first  man  who  mutilated  a  horse  in  this 
manner  had  "a  vulgar  soul"  or  that  a 
badge  of  private  servitude  is  improper 
to  an  American  citizen.  The  Middle 
Westerner  whom  these  things  have 
caused  to  gnash  the  teeth  of  patriot- 
ism and  foam  at  the  mouth  of  "nativ- 
ismus"  continues,  it  seems,  to  hold 
you  personally  responsible  for  them. 
Rationally  this  is  highly  absurd.  Why 
should  any  American,  unless  he  happens 
to  be  a  born  snob,  disquiet  himself 
because  those  "frivoles,"  who  may 
have  more  money  than  brains,  and 
who  may  even  have  possibly  more 
than  their  exact  share  of  the  "super- 


i8o    Considerations  b    tbe 


flux"  of  American  prosperity,  should 
choose  to  spend  their  money  in  absurd 
and  fantastic  ways?  Let  the  Middle 
Westerner  read  "The  House  of  Mirth," 
which,  by  the  way,  was  the  precise 
volume,  acquired  at  Oakland,  at  which 
I  had  only  the  chance  of  an  hour  or 
two  on  the  Nevada  Desert  to  read,  and 
no  other  opportunity  until  I  was  east 
of  Buffalo.  That  very  impressive 
modern  instance  of  the  wise  saw  of 
Ecclesiastes,  implicated  in  the  title, 
that  "The  heart  of  fools  is  in  the  house 
of  mirth,"  and  of  that  other  wise  saw 
of  the  good  Dr.  Watts  that 

Satan  finds  some  mischief  still 
For  idle  hands  to  do, 

should  surely  excite  rather  the  pity 
than  the  envy  of  the  Westerner,  Middle 
or  Far,  as  well  as  of  the  Easterner  who 


181 


has  occasion  to  be  thankful  that  his 
own  hands  have  been  kept  from  that 
dangerous  idleness. 

In  truth  the  sentiment  of  the  West 
toward  the  East  in  general,  and  toward 
New  York  in  particular,  should  be  one 
of  deep  sympathy.  For  of  the  immense 
attractiveness  of  this  country  as  an 
asylum  for  ' '  the  oppressed  of  all  coun- 
tries and  the  martyrs  of  every  creed" 
poor  old  New  York  is  paying  the  ex- 
pense. She  is  the  vicarious  sacrifice 
for  the  aggrandizement  of  the  West. 
The  enterprising,  the  adventurous,  the 
responsible,  the  hopeful,  of  the  great 
immigration  push  on  to  the  West,  to 
the  parts  where 


She  of  the  open  heart  and  open  door 

Has  room  about  her  hearth  for  all  mankind. 


182    Considerations  b£  tbe 


The  inert,  the  helpless,  the  unservice- 
able among  the  immigrants,  fall  by  the 
wayside,  drop  at  the  landing  place, 
become  a  burden  and  problem  for  the 
great  port  which  sifts  automatically 
this  huge  influx,  swelling,  to  be  sure, 
its  own  tables  of  population,  but 
swelling  also  its  bill  of  charities  for 
dependants  and  aggravating  its  rate 
of  mortality.  The  considerate  West- 
erner may  say  of  the  Sacrificial  City: 

Yes,  we  arraign  her;  but  she 
The  weary  Titan,  with  deaf 
Ears,  and  labor-dimmed  eyes, 
Regarding  neither  to  right 
Nor  left,  goes  passively  by, 
Staggering  on  to  her  goal  ; 
Bearing,  on  shoulders  immense, 
Atlantean,  the  load, 
Well-nigh  not  to  be  borne, 
Of  the  too  vast  orb  of  her  fate. 

And  this  the  considerate  and  patriotic 
Westerner  may  say,  even  while  the 


183 


considerate  and  patriotic  New  Yorker, 
as  a  good  American,  recognizing  that 
the  local  loss  is  the  national  gain,  may 
be  "saying  or  singing,"  according  to 
his  voice  and  tunefulness: 

And  not  by  Eastern  windows  only, 

When  daylight  comes,  comes  in  the  light, 

In  front,  the  sun  climbs  slow,  how  slowly  — 
But  Westward,  look,  the  land  is  bright. 

Meanwhile  the  "commercial  empo- 
rium" of  the  Middle  West  is,  at  least 
as  an  emporium,  quite  as  impressive 
as  the  emporium  of  the  Atlantic  slope. 

Hell  is  a  city,  much  like  London, 
A  populous  and  a  smoky  city. 

So  is  New  York.  So,  quite  equally,  is 
Chicago.  One  is  inclined  to  say  even 
more  so.  Going  back  a  block  from  the 
north  end  of  the  lake  front  one  gets  per- 
haps a  stronger  impression  of  the  hell- 


184    Considerations  b#  tbe 


ish  or  metropolitan  character  than  he 
can  get  anywhere  on  Manhattan  Island. 
I  have  just  given  Shelley's  charac- 
terization of  urbanity,  when  raised  to 
the  metropolitan  point.  Then  there  is 
Horace's,  which  Chicago  equally  ful- 
fills: "The  smoke,  the  wealth,  the  roar 
of  Rome.  '  '  The  '  '  fumus  '  '  in  the  busi- 
ness part  of  Chicago  is  far  denser  and 
more  grievous  than  anywhere  in  Man- 
hattan, owing,  of  course,  to  the  unregu- 
lated consumption  of  soft  coal,  which 
converts  the  atmosphere  into  a  murk 
through  which  the  buildings  loom  all 
the  more  mirifically  for  thus  being 
rendered  "ignote";  the  ostentation  of 
"opes"  is  at  least  equal  to  our  own; 
the  "strepitus,"  thanks  largely  to  a 
recent  and  diabolical  construction, 
through  these  smoky  and  wealthy 
parts,  of  a  new  elevated  railroad,  more 


185 


intolerably  nerve-racking  than  that  of 
the  business  center  of  Manhattan,  from 
which  these  instruments  of  torture  are 
mercifully  a  little  removed.  The  con- 
junction makes  the  aspect  of  this  part 
of  Chicago  more  "metropolitan,"  I 
think,  than  is  any  aspect  of  New  York. 

It  may  be  true  that  Chicago  has  not 
so  many  "objects  of  interest"  to  a 
stranger  as  New  York,  as  New  York, 
in  turn,  has  not  so  many  as  many  a 
European  town  of  far  less  population. 
Time  was  when  the  unfriended  stranger 
in  Chicago  who  did  not  care  about  the 
theater,  and  had  an  evening  to  pass, 
could  find  nothing  more  to  the  pur- 
pose to  do  than  to  go  and  see  "Jake" 
Schaefer  play  billiards  at  his  rooms, 
and,  on  a  subsequent  visit,  to  go  and 
watch  the  meteoric  Frank  Ives  do  the 


i86   Considerations  bg  tbe  TKflap 

same  thing.  To  be  sure,  this  was  in 
old  days,  "away  back,"  before  the 
Fair,  and  before  the  establishment  of 
the  Chicago  Orchestra,  another  "met- 
ropolitan" feature  which  Chicago  has 
and  New  York  lacks.  There  is  far 
more  to  hear  and  to  see  in  Chicago  now 
than  there  was  then.  On  this  last 
visit,  homeward  bound,  one  could  by 
no  means  grudge  the  hours  of  detention 
by  daylight  between  trains  which  en- 
abled him  to  view  the  new  Orchestra 
Hall,  the  final  trophy  and  monument  of 
the  long-delayed  fulfillment  of  the  life- 
long ambition  of  Theodore  Thomas; 
Mr.  St.  Gaudens's  spirited  and  inspirit- 
ing equestrian  figure  of  Logan  on  the 
lake  front,  and  above  all,  which  gave 
him  the  treat  of  being  personally  con- 
ducted by  its  author  over  Mr.  Louis 
Sullivan's  rational  and  artistic  realiza- 


jfraternftE  187 


tion  of  the  ideal  of  an  American  sky- 
scraper. The  astonishing  affluence  of 
decorative  genius  lavished  upon  the  de- 
tail of  the  structure  has  been  seconded 
by  an  equally  astonishing  technical 
proficiency  on  the  part  of  the  iron 
molders  and  the  wood  workers,  and  the 
combination  makes  the  building  one  of 
the  most  interesting  sights  to  a  student 
in  this  department  that  the  country 
has  to  show.  Nevertheless,  the  ulti- 
mate impression  is  rather  pathetic. 
What  are  we  about,  one  asks  himself, 
when  the  artist  who  has  shown  his 
capability  to  set  forth  in  the  new  and 
modern  diction  of  his  art  what  we 
really  "wish  to  say,"  instead  of  re- 
handling  Latin  verses,  who  could  sing 
the ' '  Song  of  these  States  "  in  the  frozen 
music  of  his  art,  instead  of  being  em- 
ployed upon  his  natural  tasks  of 


i88    Considerations  bs  tbe 


public  architecture,  State  or  municipal, 
is  shut  up  to  toiling  "at  Gaza  in  the 
mill  with  slaves,"  and  casting  his 
pearls  before  —  well,  not  wholly  appre- 
ciative spectators  ?  At  least,  irrelevant 
show  cases  hid  some  of  the  most  ex- 
quisite of  the  detail.  Or  is  it  that  the 
department  store  is  really  all  that 
architecturally,  we  really  '  '  wish  to  say'  '  ? 
That  would  be  a  discouraging  conclu- 
sion. 

"Fraternizing"  is,  naturally,  the  out- 
ward and  visible  sign  of  the  inward 
and  spiritual  feeling  of  fraternity.  Of 
course  it  is  nowhere  so  ready  and  easy 
as  in  this  country.  "Poor  or  boor," 
says  Mr.  Kipling,  "  is  the  man  who 
cannot  pick  up  a  friend  in  America," 
and  delivers  himself  of  some  just 
animadversions  upon  the  behavior  of 


dfraternits  189 


that  countryman  of  his  he  met  in  the 
Yellowstone  Park  who  warned  him 
that  "you  couldn't  be  too  careful 
whom  you  talked  to  in  those  parts," 
and  stalked  on  as  "fearing  for  his 
social  chastity."  That  is  distinctly  a 
British  trait,  and  as  distinctly  un- 
American.  On  this  trip  across  the 
continent,  if  you  are  not  ready  to  be 
hail  fellow  well  met  with  the  casual 
fellow-voyager,  at  least  if  you  show 
any  disposition  to  stand  him  off,  it  is 
certain  that  you  will  not  have  a  good 
time.  From  San  Francisco  to  Ogden 
we  had  the  company,  I  cannot  say  the 
society,  of  a  sweet-faced  old  lady,  with 
her  two  daughters,  also  of  amiable 
countenances.  The  trio  kept  them- 
selves to  themselves,  never  emerging 
from  their  "stateroom"  except  for 
meals,  and  forming  a  marked  excep- 


190    Considerations  bs  tbe 


tion  to  the  rule  of  fraternizing  and 
sororizing  throughout  the  train.  It  was 
curious  to  note  how  generally  it  was 
resented,  and  how  the  other  passengers 
wondered  "whether  those  people 
thought  themselves  better  than  any- 
body else."  As  a  matter  of  fact,  the 
seclusion  was  felt  to  be  "  un-American.  '  ' 

Readers  of  Mr  Henry  James's  in- 
teresting and  suggestive  and  difficult 
papers  upon  his  revisitation  of  his 
native  land  will  not  have  forgotten 
how  his  heart  leaped  up  when  he  be- 
held that  rainbow  in  the  sky,  the 
Harvard  fence.  He  hastens  to  explain 
that  it  was  not  much  of  a  fence,  being 
neither  impervious  nor  even  opaque. 
But  he  hails  it,  nevertheless,  as  a  bow 
of  promise,  a  symbol  of  cloistrality, 
of  seclusion,  of  privacy,  a  token  of  a 


ffraternftg  191 


good  time  coming.  Oh,  no,  one  is 
prepared  to  say  very  decisively;  that 
is  not  the  way  the  American  world 
is  going,  not  that  way,  but  quite  the 
contrary  way.  For  good  or  for  evil, 
fencelessness,  not  fencing,  is  the  ten- 
dency of  our  democracy,  and  ' '  Barriers 
Burned  Away ' '  the  course  of  our  social 
evolution.  The  late  E.  L.  Godkin  was 
an  illuminating  and  high-minded  pub- 
licist, never  to  be  mentioned  by  any 
American  journalist  without  honor. 
He  was  perhaps  in  the  European  forum 
the  most  effective  champion  of  Ameri- 
can democracy.  His  "apologias"  for 
it  against  Sir  Henry  Maine  and  other 
reluctants,  in  the  "Problems  of  Modern 
Democracy"  showed  him  to  be,  if  not 
a  convinced  believer  in  modern  demo- 
cracy, at  least  a  cheerful  acquiescent 
in  its  inevitability.  And  all  this  while, 


Considerations  b£  tbe 


in  his  daily  newspaper  work,  he  was 
dealing  modern  democracy,  with  lacer- 
ating jabs,  the  faithful  wounds  of  a 
friend.  But  although  by  his  intellect 
and  his  hope  he  belonged  to  America 
and  the  future,  by  his  personal  and 
traditionary  tastes  and  habits  he  be- 
longed to  "England  and  Yesterday," 
and  to  the  last  he  remained  an  im- 
perfectly naturalized  American.  The 
roughness  of  equality,  the  uncouth- 
ness  of  fraternity,  in  their  American 
varieties,  never  ceased  to  afflict  him. 
There  was  a  story  he  was  fond  of  re- 
peating in  print  about  the  miner  in  the 
"hotel  "  of  a  mining  camp  who  violently 
tore  down  the  canvas  screen  behind 
which  a  party  of  tourists  had  essayed 
to  shelter  themselves,  with  the  profane 
inquiry,  '  '  what  there  was  so  —  —  pri- 
vate going  on  in  there."  It  is  a  true 


jfraternitE  193 


parable.  That  daylight  should  be  let 
in  to  the  utmost  on  all  public  trans- 
actions entails  a  letting  in  of  daylight 
upon  transactions  properly  private, 
since  the  distinction  is  not  always  easy 
to  draw,  and  since  there  is  a  consider- 
able number  of  persons  professionally 
interested  that  it  should  not  be  drawn 
at  all.  I  myself  have  been  a  witness 
to  the  intrusion  of  a  casual  reporter 
into  a  club  in  which  everybody  was 
interested  in  hushing  up  the  details 
of  an  attempted  suicide,  appealing  to 
the  policeman  to  assist  his  invasion  of 
the  sacred  precincts  upon  the  ground 
that ' '  this  is  a  public  matter. ' '  This  is, 
if  you  choose,  the  seamy  side  of  our 
democracy,  the  side  which  exposes  it 
to  the  imputation  of  that  "vulgarity" 
which  Mr.  James,  again,  has  justly  de- 
scribed as  "a  question-begging  word." 


194    Consifcerattons  bs  tbe 


It  is  more  or  less  relieved,  all  over  our 
country,  by  the  pervading  "cavalleria 
rusticana,"  when  the  question  is  of 
the  feelings  of  women,  but  not  re- 
lieved at  all  when  the  question  is  of  the 
feelings  of  mere  men.  However  it 
may  be  as  a  question  of  law,  it  seems 
that  the  decision  of  the  Court  of 
Appeals  of  the  State  of  New  York  that 
there  is  no  such  thing  as  a  right  to  pri- 
vacy is  a  registration  of  the  actual 
social  fact.  And  why,  even  so,  should 
we  repine,  seeing  that  this,  too,  but 
exemplifies  the  saying  of  the  good 
Emerson,  most  American  of  philoso- 
phers, if  not  most  philosophic  of  Ameri- 
cans: "Only  that  good  lasts  which  we 
can  taste  with  all  doors  open,  and 
which  serves  all  men"? 


IV.    TRIUMPHANT  DEMOCRACY. 

"We  stand  the  latest,  and,  if  we  fail, 
probably  the  last  experiment  of  self- 
government  by  the  people."  These 
were  the  words  of  the  excellent  Mr. 
Justice  Story  of  the  Supreme  Court 
of  the  United  States,  "Story  on  the 
Constitution,"  "Story  on  the  Conflict 
of  Laws,"  Story  of  the  second  genera- 
tion of  Americans,  of  the  generation 
of  Webster  and  Clay,  of  the  immediate 
successors  of  the  founders  of  our 
Republic  and  our  Empire,  of  the  men 
who  builded  so  immensely  better  than 
they  knew.  How  queerly  old-fash- 
ioned the  doubtful  and  hesitating  words 
now  sound.  And  yet  they  were 
uttered  in  the  course  of  a  Fourth  of 
195 


196    Gonsifcerations  bs  tbe 


July  oration,  delivered,  I  suppose, 
about  the  year  1830,  not  only  within 
the  lifetime,  but  within  the  recolleo. 
tion,  of  many  Americans  now  living. 
Mr.  John  Bigelow,  for  an  illustrious 
example,  might  have  heard  that  Fourth 
of  July  speech.  A  great  deal  of  water 
has  run  under  the  bridge  since  then. 
We  are  not  in  the  habit  any  more  of 
making  those  timorous  references  to 
our  "experiment."  Those  bold  blas- 
phemers who,  in  Judge  Story's  time, 
were  insisting  that  man-made  privi- 
leges and  exclusions  were  God-made, 
that  the  tenures  of  thrones  were  part 
of  the  general  order  of  Nature,  that  the 
occupants  of  those  thrones  held  them 
by  "Divine  Right"  and  were  entitled 
to  describe  as  "Holy"  the  alliances 
they  contracted  among  themselves; 
where  are  they  now?  The  "experi- 


tlriumpbant  Democracy       197 

ment"  is  not  only  a  success,  it  is  the 
only  success.  The  very  shadow  of  its 
splendor,  a  splendor  hardly  visible  in 
1830,  in  1906 

disastrous  twilight  sheds 
On  half  the  nations,  and  with  fear  of  change 
Perplexes  monarchs. 

It  is  not  only  quite  certain  that 
"government  of  the  people,  by  the 
people,  for  the  people  shall  not  perish 
from  the  earth."  It  is  as  inevitable 
that  all  government  less  broadly  based 
and  firmly  rooted  shall  so  perish. 
That  clear  truth  enables  and  encour- 
ages an  American  of  mature  age  to  sing 
his  "Nunc  Dimittis."  "Believe  it, 
the  sweetest  canticle,0  as  Bacon  wrote, 
at  the  highest  pitch  of  his  eloquence; 
and  not  only  when  "a  man,"  but  when 
a  man's  country  and  the  country  of  his 


198    Consecrations  b£  tbe 


children,  "hath  obtained  worthy  ends 
and  expectations." 

Now  lettest  Thou  Thy  servant  depart  in 
peace,  according  to  Thy  word: 

For  mine  eyes  have  seen  Thy  salvation: 

Which  Thou  hast  prepared  before  the  face 
of  all  people; 

A  light  to  lighten  the  Gentiles,  and  the 
glory  of  Thy  people  Israel. 


truly  superb  book.  " 

N.  Y.  Globe 


LIFE  IN  THE  OPEN 

SPORT     WITH     ROD,    GUN,    HORSE,    AND    HOUND 
IN   SOUTHERN   CALIFORNIA 

By 

Charles  Frederick  Holder 

Author  of  "Life  of  Charles  Darwin"  "  Log  of  a  Sea  Angler"  etc. 
Octavo,  "with  93  Full-Page  Illustrations.     Net, 


Mr.  Holder  is  a  resident  of  the  country  of  which  he  writes,  and 
has  ridden,  driven,  sailed,  tramped,  fished,  and  shot  over  every 
foot  of  the  forest  and  sea,  plain  and  mountain,  which  he  describes 
so  picturesquely  and  with  such  keen  delight.  He  has  written  this 
book  with  zest,  and  the  reader  finds  himself  perusing  the  volume 
with  a  corresponding  sensation.  Mr.  Holder  cares  little  for  lit- 
erary punctilio  and  comes  into  print  in  the  breezy,  jaunty  fashion 
with  which  we  fancy  his  tramping  the  country  with  rod  or  gun. 
His  book  is  a  chronicle  of  sporting  experiences  that  carries  along 
with  it  a  good  deal  of  exciting  narrative  and  a  considerable 
amount  of  interesting  information  in  regard  to  social  life,  as  well 
as  the  flora  and  fauna  of  the  country  he  loves  so  well. 

Send  tor  descriptive  circular 

G.  P.  PUTNAM'S  SONS 

NEW  YORtt  LONDON 


"  The  best  work  that  has  appeared  on  this  sub-' 
ject  for  a  long  time,"—  Nashville  American. 

THE 
MYSTIC  MID=REGION 

THE  DESERTS  OF  THE  SOUTHWEST 
BY 

ARTHUR  J.   BURDICK 


Octavo.     With  54  full'page  illustrations, 
Net,  $2,25,    By  mail,  $2,40 


Mr.  Burdick  brings  to  the  public  both  a  general  know- 
ledge of  the  deserts  of  the  Southwest  and  a  particular 
acquaintance  by  means  of  pen  and  camera  with  many 
of  the  most  unique  features  and  interesting  localities 
in  California  and  adjacent  desert  regions. 

The  deserts  offer  so  many  obstacles  to  research  that 
they  are  comparatively  unknown.  He  who  braves  the 
perils  and  endures  the  hardships  finds  himself  amply 
repaid,  as  they  offer  one  of  the  most  interesting  fields 
for  exploration  and  nature  study.  The  present  volume 
is  a  faithful  chronicle  of  both  the  deserts'  pleasures  and 
terrors,  dangers  and  delights,  mysteries  and  revelations. 

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Q.  P.  PUTNAITS  SONS 

YORK  LONDON 


The  Romance  of  the 
Colorado  River  :  :  : 

A  Complete  Account  of  the  Discovery  and  of  the 
Explorations  from  1540  to  the  Present  Time, 
with  Particular  Reference  to  the  two  Voyages  of 
Powell  through  the  Line  of  the  Great  Canyons 

By  FREDERICK  S.  DELLENBAUGH 

<P°,  with  200  Illustrations,  net,  $J.JO.     By  mail,  $3.75 


"  As  graphic  and  as  interesting  as  a  novel.  .  .  .  Of  especial  value 
to  the  average  reader  is  the  multiplicity  of  pictures.  They  occur  on 
almost  every  page,  and  while  the  text  is  always  clear,  these  pictures 
give,  from  a  single  glance,  an  idea  of  the  vastness  of  the  canyons  and 
their  remarkable  formation,  which  it  would  be  beyond  the  power  of 
pen  to  describe.  And  the  color  reproduction  of  the  water-color  draw- 
ing that  Thomas  Moran  made  of  the  entrance  to  Bright  Angel  Trail 
gives  some  faint  idea  of  the  glories  of  color  which  have  made  the 
Grand  Canyon  the  wonder  and  the  admiration  of  the  world." — The 
Cleveland  Leader. 

"  His  scientific  training,  his  long  experience  in  this  region,  and  his 
eye  for  natural  scenery  enable  him  to  make  this  account  of  the  Col- 
orado River  most  graphic  and  interesting.  No  other  book  equally 
good  can  be  written  for  many  years  to  come — not  until  our  knowl- 
edge of  the  river  is  greatly  enlarged." — The  Boston  Herald, 


SEND  FOR  ILLUSTRATED  DESCRIPTIVE  CIRCULAR 

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New  York  London 


Breaking  the  Wilderness 

The  story  of  the  Conquest  of  the  Far  West,  from 
the  Wanderings  of  Cabeza  de  Vaca  to  the  first 
Descent  of  the  Colorado  by  Powell,  and  the  Com- 
pletion of  the  Union  Pacific  Railway.  With 
particular  account  of  the  exploits  of  trappers 
and  traders. 

By  FREDERICK  S.  DELLENBAUGH 

With  about  146  illustrations.  c?°,  net  $3.50. 

"  Mr.  Dellenbaugh  has  performed  here  an  excellent  and  valuable 
service  in  collecting  a  vast  array  of  heretofore  disconnected  accounts 
of  a  fascinating  and  wonderful  region  of  land  still  fraught  with  mys- 
tery and  rich  in  glorious  possibilities.  It  would  be  difficult  to  con- 
vey a  greater  amount  of  useful  and  interesting  information  in  a 
volume  of  corresponding  size  and  scope." — Phila.  North  American. 

"  Taken  as  a  whole  the  book  gives  the  most  comprehensive 
account  of  the  history  of  Western  exploration  and  discovery  that  has 
been  given  to  the  public." — N.  Y.  Tribune. 

"  No  other  American  was  so  competent  to  write  this  thrilling  and 
captivating  story.  " — Henry  Haynie  in  the  Boston  Times. 

"  A  most  readable  book.  ...  A  book  that  will  interest  every 
student  of  American  history  and  every  reader  whose  blood  is  stirred 
by  deeds  of  hardship  and  daring." — N.  Y.  Evening  Telegram. 


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UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA,  LOS  ANGELES 

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